Nigerian agricultural sector and budgetary allocation, 1990-2008

Abstract

The government budget is a financial statement of the government’s proposed expenditure and expected revenue during a particular period (usually a year). By manipulating the size and structure of the government expenditure (allocation) and revenue, government can solve a number of macro-economic problems such as low agricultural productivity (Longe, 1984; Ekpo, 1996; Ebi and Uduma, 2008 etc). Tax-derived revenue are allocated by political processes to several issues of national interest. Priority in the allocation are determined by a somewhat subjective process consisting of lobby action, representatives awareness of local support of issues by their constituencies, explicit or implicit impact of a programme or policy etc. If we view the budget as a system in itself, we note the importance of information inputs in the decision-making process. Bad inputs lead to bad outputs and bad outputs cause serious resource misallocations within the budgetary system (Hovey, 1992; Olisambu, 1992 and IFPRI, 2004). It was upon the above framework that, at the second Ordinary Assembly of the African Union (AU), in July, 2003, in Maputo, African Heads of State and Government endorsed the ‘Maputo, Declaration on Agriculture and food security in Africa’. The Declaration contains several important decisions regarding agriculture but prominent among them were the ‘commitment to the allocation of at least 10 percent national  budgetary resources to agriculture within five years (www.africaunion.org)
The year 2008 is exactly five years after the Maputo’s Declaration. Hence, it would be pertinent to examine among other things: i) Budgetary allocation to agriculture five (5) years before and after the Maputo’s Declaration ii) Budgetary allocation to agriculture in the last nine (9) years of military regime and the first nine (9) years of democratic government. iii) The trend of budgetary allocation to agriculture for the period 1990-2008. iv) Allocations to agriculture vis-à –vis other sectors of the economy for the period under review.