A Review of the roles of agricultural development programmes and projects in Nigeria.

Abstract

Agriculture plays a very dominant role in the national economy. It is one of the most important sectors of the economy from the standpoint of rural employment, adequate food for the increasing population, raw materials for building industrial sector, public revenue, employment opportunities for an expanding labour force, foreign exchange and internal market for industrial goods and services. The development of the agricultural sector has a significant role to play in the transformation and structuring of the economy of Nigeria and other economies where the majority of the labour force is primarily dependent on agriculture. Despite the huge sum of money been committed by the world Bank to the agricultural sector in Nigeria, the sector has continued to perform Agrics poorly and currently about 65 percent of the country's population, roughly 91 million people according to United Nation International Children Emergency Fund, (UNICEF) are food insecure. The Agricultural e Transformation Agenda (ATA) is recently the largest government effort to grow agriculture in Nigeria. The ond comprehensive efforts of other programmes and projects such as the Agricultural development programmes (ADP), National accelerated food production programme (NAFPP),Operation feed the Nation (OFN), National fadama development project (NFDP), among others. These programmes were designed to increase domestic food production, reduce dependence on food imports and expand value addition to locally produced agricultural products. With this foresight the government through the ATA crafted the vision 2020 program which aimed at making Nigeria one of the twenty largest world economies by the year 2020.