By CHRIS OCHAYI & CALEB AYANSINA

The Federal Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development and the Bank of Agriculture (BOA), weekend, signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU), to improve agricultural production and boost agric-business revenue in the country.

This will be achieved through better support to poor farmers, using a mechanism of refinancing Service Provider Operators (SPOs).

Speaking at the signing ceremony in Abuja, Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development, Dr. Akinwumi Adesina, said “we are changing local farming, where hoes and cutlasses are used to mechanised farming. This action will not only provide adequate and affordable food on the table of Nigerians, our teeming unemployed youths will be encouraged to go into farming, thereby providing prosperity to the people.”

In 2012, the ministry set up an Advisory Ministry Mechanisation Committee (AMMC) consisting of private sector players to develop a sustainable private sector-led Agricultural mechanisation framework, an intervention programme to immediately deploy mechanisation services to Nigerian farmers for the 2013 farming season.

Vanguard gathered that the intervention programme, which is a collaboration of the ministry and BOA was designed to set up 60 Agricultural Equipment Hiring Enterprise (AEHE). This is in consideration of the role of mechanisation in attaining the goal of self sufficiency in food production by 2015.

The MoU will form the basis for establishing Agricultural Equipment Hiring Enterprise (AEHE), to be equipped with 400 units of tractors that will help to put an additional 152,000 hectares of land under cultivation. It is also expected to add 760,000 tons of food to the national output per annum.

Under the agreement, the financing will be done through public-private partnership as BOA has undertaken to finance interested Service Provider Operators (SPOs), while the ministry will provide adequate fund toward facilitating the financing of the enterprise, in partnership with the BOA and the private sector.