By Patience Ugochi Joseph, Program Officer SUPIA
As an organization working to eradicate poverty, promoting social justice and gender equality, and a group working on budgets and budgetary process, Participatory Development Alternatives with support from ActionAid through the Scaling up Investment Public Agriculture (SUPIA) have successfully organised a one-day Stakeholders Consultative Meeting on the 2022 Agriculture Budget at San Diego Hotel, Abakaliki on 26th July 2021.
PDA deemed it fit to draw the attention of the State Government to the paltry allocations to agriculture in the State and the poor/lack of participation of smallholder women farmers in the budgetary processes in the State. However, Smallholder farmers, who are producers of over 80% of the food consumed in Nigeria, are not currently involved in the agriculture budgeting processes as there is no formal process for their involvement – resulting in untapped potential of the farmers (especially women and youths), and the attendant low productivity.
During the analysis of the 2021 agriculture budget of Ebonyi State, and Stakeholders consultative meetings, participants through the media made the following recommendations for the subsequent agriculture budget
- There should be political will to allocate at least 10% of annual budgets (and actual expenditure) to the agriculture sector to increase the realization of the Maputo and Malabo benchmarks for agricultural investment. Additionally, given the time bound nature of farming activities, agricultural budgets must be released on time and fully to enable farmers plant in due season.
- The 2022 and subsequent years agriculture budget should be gender sensitive and responsive by providing line items that address specific challenges that affect women farmers different from men as well as creating budget lines for women farmers and other groups such as youths.
- Government should provide post-harvest reduction support with focus on processing facilities and storage facilities
- The State Ministry of Agriculture should create budget line strengthening access to credit and provide an enabling environment to guarantee access to finance especially for women and youth who may lack access to collateral required by lenders.
- The stakeholders’ consultative meeting should be taken as an integral part of the budgeting process across all the MDAs in the agriculture sector both at State and LGA levels, as it is productive, and allows stakeholders to make inputs in the pre-budget
- There is a huge gap in extension agent – farmer ratio, which has a limiting effect on technology transfer to farmers; concentration should be on farmers field school and demonstration plots, mobility etc.
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