Nigeria Incentive-Based Risk Sharing System for Agricultural Lending (NIRSAL) has projected the country’s agricultural exports revenue to reach $4.4 billion (N1.6 trillion) by the end of this year.
Managing Director, NIRSAL, Aliyu Abdulhameed, who disclosed this to Bloomberg, said that NIRSAL has disbursed $373 million to farmers in the past year to help increase production of export crops.
According to Bloomberg, he stated, “The credit beneficiaries are mainly small-holder farmers growing cotton, rice, oil palm, cassava and corn. At average yield of four tons per hectare, these optimized small-holder farmers’ production would generate a gross output of about 16 million tons. Revenue from the exports is expected to reach 1.6 trillion naira ($4.4 billion) by the end of this year”.
NIRSAL works with banks to guarantee as much as 75 percent of loans to agriculture. The federal government is increasing efforts to diversify the country’s sources of export income after a plunge in crude prices from 2014 triggered the country’s worst economic contraction in 25 years in 2016.
