Worried about the worsening employment and poverty situation across Nigeria, Hill Crest Agro-allied Industries Limited, a leading agricultural produce processing company, has put in place efforts to address the issue with improved investments in agriculture.

According to Emmanuel Tarfa of Hill Crest Agro-Allied Industries Limited, “Agriculture is a viable way to eradicate poverty whilst solving the problem of hunger and malnutrition in the country. In the third quarter of 2018, Nigeria’s unemployment rate stood at 23.1 per cent of the total workforce, up from 18.1 per cent a year earlier. Also, a new update on The World Poverty Clock shows Nigeria has overtaken India (with seven times the population of Nigeria) as the country with the largest number of extremely poor people in the world.”

Also read: CTG: CBN to engage 300,000 farmers to produce 450,000 metric tons of cotton

This, he said, cannot continue. As such, Hill Crest, which currently owns and operates a 14MT per hour (75,000MT per annum) rice processing mill that produces parboiled head rice and delivers to the final customer through a wide network of distributors across Nigeria, is leading the charge to add more investments in agriculture. This improved investment, he said, will help to increase rural farmers’ productivity and income, open the industry for other value chain development and, thereby, create more jobs and employment for the country’s teeming population.

He said, “While public sector investment is key in eradicating poverty because it makes available public goods such as agricultural research and extension, education, infrastructure and services usually not supplied by the private sector – private investments have a strong role to play in helping create markets for the poor, adding value to primary agricultural products, lowering the costs of technologies and services and fostering decent rural employment. The public sector also provides crucial incentives for the regulation of sustainable management of natural resources.”

Tarfa also cited Nigeria’s economic recovery plan which identified six priority sectors: agriculture, manufacturing, and solid minerals, including iron, gold and coal. “Of these sectors, there is increasing evidence that agriculture can contribute to poverty reduction beyond just direct impact on the revenues accruable to farmers. Hill Crest also believes that investment and productivity in agriculture will increase revenue and provide employment opportunities across the value chain in both rural and urban areas.

“Public investment can also help to stimulate the positive conditions on the ground that can attract further private investment both from the rural communities themselves and from the corporate private sector. The latter has a multiplier effect on the local economy. These benefits include generating demand for food and other rural goods and services. This will, in turn, create more employment opportunities for poor rural people, including those without access to land.

“In addition to investing in agriculture, the fight to reduce poverty will also require investing in rural non-farm economies, strengthening of rural institutions and organisations, and expanding the coverage of social policies social protection, basic infrastructure and public services,” added Tarfa.

Tarfa further said that apart from what Hill-Crest is doing, the Nigerian government will need to improve access to technologies, services and markets; access to and sustainable management of natural resources for poor rural people, including smallholders and family farmers, to increase their productivity and income in the context of mitigation and adaptation to climate change.

Located in Ajase Ipo, Kwara State, the Hill Crest Agro-Allied Industries’ factory is fully equipped with state-of-the-art manufacturing machinery and a warehouse capacity of 10,000 metric tonnes. Its parboiling machine currently produces about 100 metric tonnes per day while the milling machine churns out six metric tonnes per hour.

Vanguard