Minister of Agriculture Advocates Easy Access to Land for Farmers

Today-December 9, 2013
Nigeria:Dr. Akinwumi Adesina, the Minister of Agriculture, on Sunday, underscored the need to allow farmers in the country to own farmlands to support the Federal Government’s agricultural development project.

Akinwumi Adesina

Adesina, who made this known in Abuja, said that farmers should be able to register and be given the title deeds to the farmlands they use.

The minister also said that easy access to land would add impetus to the Federal Government’s Agricultural Transformation Agenda as it would attract investors to the sector.

“Land is what farmers need to be able to use as collateral. So, every land that people have they should be able to register that land and have titles to those lands so that they can use that as collateral in credit markets,” Adesina said.......

“Also, we must make it easier for investors to get access to land because without security of access to land, it makes it quite difficult. There is too much focus on land for urban development; we are not focusing on land use for agricultural and rural development. I sent my team to Rwanda to go and look at how they actually did their land registration and land titling. We are going to launch some pilots in some states around these staple crop processing zones that we are going to have. The lands in those communities, we will register them, we will give them titles, the governors will work with us on that to pilot and show how it will be like. So my firm belief is that we should just basically make it easy for people just to register their lands and have title over their lands.”

According to him, agriculture accounts for at least 36.5% of the country’s gross domestic product and employs nearly 45% of Nigeria’s workforce.