Nigeria is endowed with vast agricultural resources that have remained largely untapped potentials.
The objective of the Agriculture and Agro Allied arm of Backbone Infrastructure Nigeria Limited (BINL) is called “Corridor Agro-Allied Services” and its aim is to facilitate investment into the Nigerian agriculture sector, so as to transform it into a globally competitive, inclusive and business-oriented sector that creates wealth, generates gainful employment, and improves the quality of life of the various players and stakeholders in the agricultural value chain.
Corridor Agro Allied Services intends to attract investments by adopting two strategic approaches:
Promoting Special Agro Industrial Processing Zones (SAPZ):
An agro-based spatial and cluster development initiative, designed to concentrate agro-processing activities within areas of high agricultural potential by boosting productivity and production on one hand, and integrate processing and marketing of agricultural commodities in efficient manner on the other hand. This provides an end-to-end solution to the development of the various agricultural value chains. There are two major aspects to make the end-to-end solution realistic:
a) Supporting the boosting of the productivity (and by implication production and marketable surplus) of agro-commodities at the upstream level (farm level) upstream activities;
b) Identifying and developing of an agro-processing hub (downstream activities) thereby linking production to processing and eventual marketing (the Hub). All these are to be privately managed.
Promoting Commercial Agro based farms:
This involves the identification of large scale business opportunities either promoted solely or in joint venture for commercially viable agricultural farms especially for those related agro-commodities that have great export earning potential or those that can be good for import substitutions.
The goal is to identify in various locations that are viable as investment ventures across the agricultural and ecological zones of Nigeria. It will thus fit into the overall goal of Backbone Infrastructure Nigeria Limited (BINL) to help diversify the Nigerian economy in order to have shared prosperity of the nation’s endowment.
