(Ecofin Agency) - As oil drowned Nigeria into recession, the country now looks back to Agriculture to get back to the surface. “If we get it well in agriculture, we will get it well in the economy,” said Vice-President Yemi Osinbajo, last month while launching an agricultural programme.

Though booming in the past, the agricultural sector was abandoned after large deposits of oil were found offshore the Gulf of Guinea in the 1950s.

Nigeria was at the time the world’s leading palm oil exporter ahead of Malaysia and Indonesia, and according to the Cocoa Association of Nigeria (CAN), used to produce more cocoa than Cote d’Ivoire with 18% of global output. Today however, the country imports its palm oil from Malaysia and produces only 8% of global cocoa output.

“We must return to agriculture and especially cocoa,” said CAN’s President, Sayina Riman, highliting that exporting cocoa could boost Nigeria’s revenues.

With 84 million hectares of arable lands, Africa’s second largest economy could obviously rely on its agricultural sector to feed its population but export as well.

The priority now is to bring farming from the subsistence to commercial and even industrial level. Why ? Well, popular This Day newspaper columnist Simon Kolawole responds saying: “if we really want to diversify from oil and create proper value, agriculture must give birth to industry”.

Africa’s richest Aliko Dangote rapidly understood the importance of agriculture for Nigeria to be less dependent on oil. He in fact recently invested in a tomato paste factory and has also injected a billion dollar in a rice farm for which first harvest’s produce is expected to be sold next December.

Nigeria’s President, Muhammadu Buhari, said his government would devote more resources to agriculture in the 2017 budget. “We intend to put more resources in our 2017 budget, especially in the procurement of machinery for land clearing, fertilizers, pesticides and training of less-educated farmers, as farm extension instructors,” Buhari said while speaking at the sixth edition of the Tokyo International Conference of Africa’s Development (TICAD VI).

To recapitulate Nigeria’s particularly grim situation, let’s say it has been suffering for a few years now an unprecedented economic crisis which resulted from a plunge in prices of oil, which generates 70% of the nation’s revenues. Nigeria is in fact no more able to pay civil servants. Moreover, its GDP has slumped by 2.1% at the second quarter of the year, the National Bureau of Statistics revealed last Wednesday.

 Alain Okpeitcha