There's so much lack of understanding of agriculture on this TL that it makes one alarmed

What people need to understand about it is that every crop harvested and processed produces byproducts that are equal in to 3 or 4 times the value of the crop itself

And so, for example
Processed rice will give husks, bran, and fibres which are useful for several additives in animal feed, power generation, and other industrial uses, apart from the rice itself which we consume as a staple and as baby food

Processed maize, soybean, cassava, etc will give several
by-products like starch, ethanol, animal feed, and others in addition to the regular products we expect from the crops.

Cotton and palm oil will produce so many products from processing, that several seperate outputs we buy like brake pads, soap, Carboxymethyl cellulose, etc
are byproducts of their processing.

We buy all these products from other countries at the cost of our scarce hard currency, whereas they just process one or two crops, and sell us 20 different products.

It is this ignorance about the importance of agriculture that has plagued
our economy for all these decades.

When New Zealand, India and Netherlands sell us milk in millions of tons, are we aware they feed their cows from byproducts and waste which is produced while they process other crops in their manufacturing sector?

They feed their animals with
food that costs next to nothing because they are processing their agricultural produce to make many valuable products

Thiw is what we are trying to replicate in Nigeria by promoting agriculture

Currently we allow almost 3/4 of our output to rot away because we prefer to import
processing "waste" from other countries.

Let's upgrade our abysmal ignorance about agriculture in this country.

Western nations can afford to subsidize agriculture because they more than compensate for it from the byproducts of processing the crop outputs.

They can afford to
pay farmers to produce at a loss because the crop outputs are what powers their industrial economies from where they export and make surplus profits from selling to fools like us.

Our masses are hungry, jobless, sick & uneducated, whereas we spend scarce resources importing food
from Europe, America and Asia.

We need to upgrade our understanding of how this world works, otherwise our trade rivals will keep taking us for a ride.

There is no "better" industry than agriculture.

End
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