Brazil to boost Nigeria’s Agribusiness sector with $1 billion

Brazil’s Ambassador to Nigeria, Francisco Carlos Soares Luz has disclosed that Brazil is willing to boost Nigeria’s agribusiness sector with $1 billion over the next three years, having set aside $100 million so far.

This disclosure was made during a symposium on agribusiness finance, with the theme “Making Agribusiness Bankable: Lenders and Investors Expectations,” which was organised by the Financial Services Group (FSG) of the Lagos Chamber of Commerce and Industry (LCCI).

According to Luz, as reported by This Day, the fund will be deployed to import agro machinery from Brazil to enable Nigerians have access to them. Also, Luz said that Brazil would assist Nigeria in cassava and sugarcane production as he said that about 8000 megawatts of electricity and ethanol for fuel is generated from sugar cane in Brazil.

Speaking on the Nigerian agricultural sector, the President of LCCI, Babatunde Paul Ruwase, said that the sector attracted $169.37 million foreign direct investment between April and June 2019.

“Research conducted locally and internationally confirmed a positive correlation between agriculture finance and agriculture development. Nigeria needs to scale up investments in improving agriculture yield and integrating the value chain over the next decade to effectively capture a significant share of the market.”

Also present at the event was the Chairperson of the FSG, Mrs Mojisola Bakare and the Managing Director of NIRSAL Plc, Mr Aliyu Abdulhameed, who gave their own contributions towards the discussion on providing sustainable financing for agribusiness across the entire value chains.

In a recent Nairametrics report, NIRSAL announced that its initiative had created about 400,000 jobs in different segments of the agricultural value chain. These jobs were made possible via the provision of N101 billion by banks as the money was utilised in catering for 693 agricultural projects.