The Vice President, Professor Yemi Osinbajo’s led National Economic Council (NEC) recently launched a ten-year National Livestock Transformation Plan (NLTP), an agricultural initiative that involves a 100-billion-naira commitment by the federal government in collaboration with the states of the federation. This comes after the Rural Grazing Areas (RUGA) plan, a parallel plan for herdsmen supposedly invented by the Ministry of Agriculture was vehemently resisted by the larger public as an ill-intended ethnic subjugation ploy by a section of the country over others. This plan was dispensed with after many failed attempts to force it across the states of the federation.
This earlier RUGA episode makes many to still view the NLTP with suspicion, as a revised plan by proponents of RUGA to execute their perceived ethnic agenda. This is in spite of the NLTP’s emphasis on the economic prospects of efficient livestock and ecological management as the solution to the ethnic clashes that birthed the suspicions in the first place. It becomes necessary then to assess this plan from a different angle, which is what the figures say.
Nigeria’s Agricultural output keeps growing but livestock production is on a continuous decline
There has been a steady rise in the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) from Nigeria’s Agricultural sector in the past five years. This is not the case with the industrial sector where the country recorded drops in productivity between 2014 and 2016, before experiencing a recovery in 2017 and 2018. The Services sector, though the leading contributor to the country’s GDP within the period, has had its output value reduce consistently for the past four years.
The GDP is the money value of the goods and services produced in a country over a period of time. It is the market value of what every individual has produced or the total money value of service they have each provided within the country, whether they are immigrants or indigenes. For instance, the GDP of an individual may be calculated by the amount she receives as wages for work done or service provided. That wage is the estimated value of what she has produced. This is an income approach to calculating the GDP.
On the reverse the GDP could be calculated by how much her employer spent as wages to make her produce on behalf of the company, on purchase of capital equipment, on loan from the bank to further invest in the business. This is an expenditure approach. The third way of estimating the GDP is by totaling the added value each person or industry contributes as production progresses till a product or service reaches the final customer.
For the Agricultural sector, the value of its products rose from N15.38 trillion in 2014 to N16.61 trillion in 2016 and peaked at N17.54 trillion this last year. While this consistent progress in agricultural output offers possibilities for more individual share of national wealth from the sector, the performance of its livestock subsector calls for concern.
Prior to the first bomb blast by a terrorist in the North East of Nigeria in January 2010, there was a relatively uniform trend in the growth (or decline) of agricultural output in all the four divisions of the sector, namely, crop production, livestock, forestry and fishing.
Beyond 2010, however, a sharp divergence in the growth rate of production within the agricultural sector began to occur. It could be seen initially, between 2007 and 2010 that agricultural output was generally on the decline, falling gradually within a range of 7% to 6%. But from 2011 till present time, a systemic disturbance has occasioned haphazard and unpredictable outcomes in the agricultural sector.
Many studies and official statistical reports conclude that this phenomenon results from the threats of Islamic insurgency in the North East and Lake Chad Basin area, invasion and displacement of crop farming communities in the North Central by armed herdsmen, cattle rustling and the negative outcomes of climate change.
However, it appears the most hardly hit agricultural output is livestock production. Although it still maintains second place to crop production in the volume of contribution to the agriculture sector, it has recently experienced more downturns than increases in its output. While the agricultural sector as a whole has been experiencing increased growth consistently for the past five years, livestock production has been slowing down annually, from 6% in 2015 to 3% in 2016, 1.6% in 2017 and 0.3% in 2018. This free fall in the level of livestock output need be salvaged from dipping further down into the negative region as the case was in 2012, when livestock production levels of diaries and meat sunk to an all-time low of -2.6%.
The federal government’s newly launched intervention through the National Livestock Transformation Plan needs the state actors as well as strategic stakeholders to abide by the spirit of the plan which is rooted in economic investment, conflict resolution, law and order, humanitarian relief, information education, strategic communication and cross-cutting issues. This is the only way livestock farming can be resuscitated, lawless livestock handlers reformed, and the livestock business mutually rewarding to all.