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MDAs Must Contribute to Policy Formulation, Implementation of Organic Agriculture in Nigeria – Experts

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“That the understanding of most stakeholders in Nigeria of the required procedures for certification of organic produce and products for both domestic and export trade is still low, that appropriate attention should be paid to the organic agriculture sector for enabling environment for development of the sector.

By Abdulrahman Aliagan, Abuja

Experts at the just concluded of 2021 National Organic Agriculture Business Summit (6th edition) held at Nigerian Export Promotion Council Headquarters, Abuja, Nigeria has resolved among others issues in a communique issued at the end of the summit that Ministries, Departments and Agencies of government (MDAs) need to contribute to formulation and implementation of organic agriculture policy in Nigeria.

It was equally advised that stakeholders of organic agriculture in the country should have good understanding of the principles and practices of Organic Agriculture; adding that the level of organic agriculture trade (domestic and export) in Nigeria although growing, but still at the low ebb compared to leading countries in the organic sector of Africa.

The Communique further stated that funding for organic agriculture and Ecological activities in Nigeria is low in relation to the needs of the sector; noting that there is huge technical knowledge gap on Organic Agriculture production system for export in the country.

It added “that the issue of agricultural extension services to facilitate Organic Agriculture in the country needs to be addressed;

“That the understanding of most stakeholders in Nigeria of the required procedures for certification of organic produce and products for both domestic and export trade is still low;

“That appropriate attention should be paid to the organic agriculture sector for enabling environment for development of the sector;

“That there is the need for a definite engagement of youths, special people and women in Organic Agriculture for meaningful livelihood development for all;

“That there is the need to put in motion necessary apparatus that can lead to increase in Organic market share (in terms of produce, products and services) from Nigeria at the global market and participation in BioFach (which holds yearly in mid-February at Nuremberg, Germany);

“Stressed the need for MDAs to contribute toward funding of the annual National Organic Agriculture Business Summit in order to extend its benefits to more stakeholders, thereby contributing to national development;

 “Stressed also the need to increase efforts on mainstreaming Organic Agriculture into existing curricula for agricultural training at all levels of education in Nigeria.

The experts at the Summit recalled in a Communique that, “Nigeria subscribes to the Sustainable Development Goals; specifically Goal 2 (Zero Hunger), Goal 3 (Good Health and Well-being), Goal 5 (Gender Equality) and Goal 12 (Responsible Consumption and Production) and the Malabo Declaration that are relevant to Organic Agriculture;

“That export value in Organic Agriculture sector of the country is much lower, compared to some countries in Africa that are smaller in land size and population;

“Those available facts reveal paucity of scientific evidence to support Organic Agriculture in Nigeria, especially for policy, exportable produce and products;

“That Organic Agriculture is yet to be reflected in the existing curricula relating to agriculture in academic programmes at all levels in Nigeria;

“That agricultural funding policy of the government is yet to give adequate attention to the Organic Agriculture sub-sector.

The experts therefore all tiers of government in Nigeria to fully explore opportunities in the decision of the African Heads of States and Governments on Organic Farming [EX.CL/Dec.621 (XVII), 2010];

 The Federal Ministry of Information and Culture to ensure proper dissemination/public awareness of the benefits, principles and practice of Organic Agriculture in the country;

 ECOWAS Commission as well as relevant international development organisations to support the annual National Organic Agriculture Business Summit to enable more entrepreneurs in Organic Agriculture sector of Nigeria tap into ECOWAS open-doors for exports and other international opportunities, including participation in the biggest annual organic exhibition – BioFach at Nuremberg, Germany;

 Nigeria as a country to have a robust multi-ministerial/sectoral policy on organic agriculture to be led by the Federal Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development in order to provide enabling environment for development of the sector in the country;

 All relevant or appropriate governmental and private stakeholders to put in place a consistent and proper monitoring of Organic Agricultural enterprises to uphold the integrity of the Organic Agriculture sector of the country;

 MDAs relevant to organic agriculture sector like Federal Ministries of Industry, Trade and Investments,

Agriculture & Rural Development, Nigerian Export Promotion Council (NEPC), Small and Medium Enterprises Development Agency of Nigeria (SMEDAN) and financial institutions like Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), Bank of Agriculture, Bank of Industry and similar others, support the processes of improving quality of organic agriculture produce and products from Nigeria with respect to the development and organic certification for export market;

   

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This is not a story about a reluctant investor. It is a story about capital that wants to move, cannot find enough places willing and able to receive it in a form it can underwrite, and quietly waits instead. Multiply that fund by the hundreds of pension schemes, sovereign wealth vehicles, commercial banks and infrastructure funds now carrying dedicated allocations for emerging-market infrastructure, and a pattern emerges that rarely makes it into a headline: the world is not short of capital for infrastructure. It has capital in historic abundance, sitting adjacent to a historic infrastructure gap, unable to cross the distance between the two. The Comfortable Explanation  The explanation on offer at every major infrastructure summit is a familiar one. Global infrastructure investment needs run into the tens of trillions of dollars over the coming decade; committed capital falls well short; therefore, the problem is one of insufficient funding, and the solution is more of it: more pledges, more blended-finance facilities, more climate funds, more multilateral capital increases. It is a comfortable explanation because it assigns responsibility clearly to governments who under-fund, institutions who under-commit, and it offers a clean remedy: raise more. It is also, on close inspection, not what the evidence shows. Pension funds globally hold trillions in assets under management with explicit infrastructure allocations that remain structurally underweight, not because trustees have rejected the asset class but because deal flow meeting their risk and governance thresholds has not materialised at the pace their mandates assume. Sovereign wealth funds report the same pattern. Commercial banks with dedicated project finance desks describe pipelines that look full at the term-sheet stage and thin dramatically by financial close. Development finance institutions, whose entire purpose is to absorb risk that commercial capital will not, routinely report that their binding constraint is not capital adequacy but the volume of bankable transactions their teams can originate and structure in a given year. None of this fits the scarcity narrative. All of it fits a different one. Availability Is Not Deployability  Capital availability and capital deployability are not the same condition, and the conflation of the two is doing real damage to how the world thinks about the infrastructure gap. Availability asks whether money exists somewhere with a mandate that could, in principle, be pointed at infrastructure. Deployability asks something much narrower and much harder: whether a specific project, at a specific moment, has been engineered, structured, documented and de-risked to the point where an investment committee can approve it without exception. The first condition is met, overwhelmingly, across nearly every category of capital that matters to infrastructure. The second is met by only a small fraction of the projects competing for it. The result is a market that looks, from the outside, like a financing gap, and functions, from the inside, like a conversion problem: an abundance of capital on one side, an abundance of infrastructure need on the other, and an underbuilt set of mechanisms in between capable of turning one into the other at any meaningful scale. Where the Conversion Breaks  The break does not happen at the ends of the process. It happens in the middle, in the unglamorous sequence of work that turns a plausible concept into an instrument a fiduciary can sign. A promising transmission project needs a feasibility study rigorous enough to survive institutional scrutiny rather than optimistic enough to attract early interest. It needs offtake arrangements that hold up under real counterparty and currency risk, not the counterparty risk assumed in a base case. It needs environmental and social documentation calibrated to the standards of the institutions being asked to fund it, not the standards of the jurisdiction hosting it. It needs a legal and commercial structure that allocates risk in ways a commercial lender, not only a development financier, will accept. It needs a sponsor capable of executing what has been proposed, not merely capable of proposing it. Each of these is ordinary project finance discipline. None of it is exotic, and in mature infrastructure markets it happens as a matter of course, absorbed into systems built over decades: specialist advisers, standard-form contracts, established procurement norms, deep pools of transaction expertise. What is missing in the markets where the infrastructure gap is largest is not the standard itself but the machinery that meets it. Projects arrive at investment committees with ambition intact and preparation incomplete, and that gap is treated, again and again, as an individual project’s failure rather than what it actually is: a structural absence in the systems responsible for producing investable transactions at scale. The Missing Middle  This is the Missing Middle of Infrastructure Finance: the institutional architecture that sits between capital that wants to move and infrastructure that needs building, and whose incompleteness explains far more of the global infrastructure gap than any shortfall in committed funds. It consists of project preparation facilities able to fund feasibility and structuring work before commercial viability has been proven. Transaction advisers capable of building deals that satisfy development mandates and commercial return thresholds at once, rather than treating the two as separate constituencies to be managed sequentially. Risk-sharing and guarantee instruments that convert political, regulatory and currency risk into something a commercial balance sheet can underwrite. Aggregation platforms that bundle smaller, individually sub-scale projects into portfolios large enough to justify institutional transaction costs. Standardised documentation that reduces the bespoke legal cost of every new deal. And coordination across ministries, regulators and financiers robust enough that a technically sound project does not die in bureaucratic sequencing after the money has already been found. None of these are new ideas in isolation. What is missing is their assembly into a coherent system, deliberately funded and institutionally accountable, rather than scattered across donor-funded pilots that end when the grant does. The African Dimension  Africa makes this dynamic unusually visible, and consequently offers an unusually clear opportunity to correct it. The continent’s infrastructure financing need, by any measure, is vast. Less understood is that the shortfall is disproportionately one of preparation rather than capital. Nigerian gas-to-power, off-grid solar and mini-grid developers have each demonstrated that individual projects can clear the bankability bar; what has not emerged is systemic pipeline scale, a steady stream of comparably prepared projects large enough to absorb the capital already circling the sector. The pattern repeats, with local variation, from grid infrastructure in East Africa to transport corridors in West Africa. Interested capital is rarely the scarce input. Investment-ready projects are. 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