Barney Jopson writes in the FT:
The global crisis precipitated by soaring food prices has cast a spotlight on the low productivity of agriculture across Africa - especially when compared with Asia - and the reasons for it.
Country-by-country, the problems come in a variety of constellations. But the essential elements tend to be the same: farmers' difficulty in obtaining fertiliser; patchy access to credit; limited outreach programmes offering technical training; the absence of high-yielding seeds and modern equipment; poor or non-existent irrigation systems; bad transport links; and a lack of information on fair prices.
Yet Nigeria, as in so many other ways, is different. Not because it is not burdened by some or all of these problems. It is. But because they will fade into irrelevance if the country simply runs out of people who are willing to put up with them...[continue reading]
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