GOVERNOR UDOM EMMANUEL REMARKS AT THE INTER-AGENCY RETREAT ON AGRICULTURAL INVESTMENTS ORGANIZED BY DIRECTORATE OF AGRICULTURAL INVESTMENTS, AKWA IBOM INVESTMENT CORPORATION (AKICORP), MONDAY, 7TH OCTOBER – TUESDAY 8TH OCTOBER, 2019
Let me start by commending the Directorate of Agricultural Investments for organizing this retreat. In the past four and half years, I have been privileged to know the fact that any good leader should be able to feed his own citizenry. And for us, this is just simple; 80 percent of what we consume has to come from here. If you check around, so many countries of the world are not as fortunate as we are. If you check, from January to December, everything is lush green; in nearly all the months of the year, you have rainfall and as such there is hardly anything you grow here that cannot have good yield. So, why can’t we grow 80 percent of what we eat here? If you go around the 31 LGAs of the State, we have a major advantage. So, why can’t we grow 80 percent of what we eat from here?
This is why so much emphasis has been given to agriculture. Even God himself started by taking man out of the ground; everything man needs has to come out of the ground. There is nothing on planet earth that you cannot relate to the earth, because that is where man came from. So, let all of us go back to the ground for the development of Africa. The richest man anywhere in the world that he is found must always have something to do with agriculture. If Bill Gates will have something to do with agriculture, who else shouldn’t
So, as a State Government, we really have to find our strength in agriculture, at least to be able to feed our citizens before we talk about export. There are lots of related agencies involved in agricultural investments; Ministry of Agriculture, Ministry of Trade and Industry, Foreign Direct Investment (FDI); they are all interwoven, and it will make speed and success much more accelerated than a single unit. We need to see that collaboration. And of recent, we have a lot of opportunities and as a State Government, we thought of setting up an investment agency but that will make us to go back to the State House of Assembly (for legislation), but we have an investment corporation, AKICORP. And instead of having another investment agency purely for Agriculture, the Directorate of Agricultural Investments is domiciled in AKICORP. Analysis for investments is different from one portfolio to another, so we needed someone who can concentrate on agricultural investments), and his expertise and training will be different. So, today we have an arm that will strictly focusing on Agriculture.
The State EXCO has approved an agric-based microfinance bank, Ibom Fadama Agric Microfinance Bank. I feel passionate about Agriculture and I want everybody to get back to Agriculture. I have a farm land which I am planting and I have just been told that I need to visit my farm as soon as possible; that my cocoa will soon start fruiting. So, imagine if I have say, 500 hectares of Cocoa and I harvest that, process it through our Cocoa processing plant; how much I can make every year and how many people I am employing there now? So, it’s a lot, the easiest way to get people out of the street is agriculture. Take for instant, the tomato that we have, the market cannot even off-take what we have now. So, we are seeing how we can push in investments into this area for processing of tomatoes.
The demand for cassava chips is high in the market, but if we go by that, we won’t have enough garri to eat so we have to find a way to ensure that we make garri available for our consumption. Our rice mills must be able to produce 60 percent of the rice eaten here.
Out target has been that every Federal Constituency must have garri processing mills that can do minimum of 100 bags of garri every day. So, if we do 50kg of 100 minimum bags of garri every day, and we do not break that chain, it means we will produce 1000 minimum bags of garri every day, and how much is our population? Grossly seven million people, and if we produce 6,000 bags weekly, that is enough. So about cassava, anywhere you are; cooperate with me so we plant the largest acreage possibly.
The Ministry of Agriculture should make Cassava stems available free for people to plant. Same thing is for corn. The area we need to pay serious attention to is oil palm (I’m sure Central Bank has come into this area), but we have a comparative advantage over other states. You can see palm kernel everywhere in the country but the real oil palm is in Akwa Ibom State. People only come in here to buy our kernel and take it out and when they take it out they count it for others because they have processing facilities.
But I believe that by the time the Coconut Refinery takes off, the refinery should be able to refine palm kernel and we should be able to capture the statistics then. You see the palm oil tree growing naturally, it is very rich in palm kernel oil and it is also rich in palm oil itself. Our natural palm tree is richer in palm kernel oil than others, and this why others come in here to off-take them, yet the statistics would not capture it for us because it is in a raw form.
Our palm tree is very rich, just like any other crops we have. Then, why should we import cucumber? Why should we import okra, tomatoes, plantain and banana? These are staple foods that we eat on daily basis.
Even if you don’t need the crops as food, cultivate as charity, please let’s cultivate. If we take it as a burden, it will spread like wild fire. Even if you don’t eat the crops you are cultivating, let it be as your contributions to the community. Let all of us have at least an hectare.
