NIRSAL Aims At N1.6tn Revenue For Smallholder Farmers

The Nigerian Incentive-Based Risk Sharing System for Agricultural Lending is planning to assist smallholder farmers to generate a total revenue of N1.6tn.

The revenue is expected to be generated through the cultivation of four million hectares of farm produce such as maize, rice, cassava and cotton.

NIRSAL is a risk-sharing system created by the Central Bank of Nigeria with a mandate to enhance the flow of affordable finance and investments into fixed agricultural value chains.

The Managing Director, NIRSAL, Mr Aliyu Abdulhameed, gave these figures during a workshop organised by the Forum for Agricultural Research in Africa and the Arewa Research and Development Project.

The workshop focused on addressing capacity gaps in order to boost agriculture in Africa.

He said NIRSAL is using technology to address some of the challenges affecting the agricultural value chain.

For instance, he said NIRSAL was using Geospatial mapping to aggregate four million hectares of arable land as a pilot project, adding that this would be broken down into 16,000 Geo-Cooperatives of 250 hectares each.

The NIRSAL MD said at an average yield of four tonnes per hectare, these optimised smallholder farmers production would generate a gross output of grain product equivalent of about 16 million tonnes.

He noted that at a conservative value of N100,000 per tonne of grain, this output would result in N1.6tn gross revenue from the four million hectares.

He said, “We are deploying world-class technological capabilities for field mapping of agricultural commodity endemic areas, acquiring geospatial data using satellite technology, which enables us to direct financial and technical support to farming areas with highest yield potential.