Chief executive officer of Sterling Bank Plc, Mr. Abubakar Suleiman has said, the bank is ready and willing to invest more in Nigeria’s agricultural sector, having invested more than N100 billion; a figure that represents about 15 per cent of the bank’s total loans portfolio.
The CEO stated this in his closing remarks at the Agriculture Summit Africa (ASA) 2022 with the theme: ‘Engineering a Trillion Dollar Agricultural Economy’ held recently with more than 10,000 attendees from across the world.
Agriculture is one of the five sectors of the economy that the bank has focused its investments since 2018 as part of her HEART of Sterling strategy. The others are health, education, transportation, and renewable energy.
Suleiman observed that apart from the Bank of Agriculture, there is no any other financial institution that has committed its resources to agricultural financing like Sterling Bank.
The CEO noted that the summit became imperative as part of the global conversation on food security due to the consequences of global trade which was so obvious during the COVID-19 pandemic when there was a global disruption in the supply chain.
“So, this conversation about food security in Africa is one that we will continue to sponsor because of its existential purpose which is about leveraging our competitive advantage,” he said.
ASA, hosted by Sterling Bank, is one of the continent’s leading, privately funded platforms dedicated to increasing the value of the agribusiness value chain by creating a convergence of private and public sector interests, development finance institutions, agribusiness investors and players.
This year’s edition featured four panels over two days of deliberations, with discussions on solving the challenge of import substitution for large scale manufacturers by facilitating the sourcing of key inputs locally, achieving sustainable productivity at scale; increasing the adoption of technology to improve output as well as discussions on a framework to standardise agro-commodities trade and exchange to increase the value created in the sector and open up new investment opportunities.
The country manager of Netherlands-based Bank, Rabobank, Mr. Kevin Kabatsi, talked about how the bank is using agriculture exchange to create a digital marketplace in countries where it operates.
The Lagos State commissioner for agriculture, Ms. Abisola Olusanya, encouraged youths that are seeking greener pastures outside the shores of the country to have a rethink because opportunities abound in the country because of gaps in the agricultural value chain.
She also said Lagos State can only produce 15,000 tonnes of red meat yearly but consumes more than 342,000 tonnes of red meat with transaction value of N350 billion sitting on the table which nobody is picking up.
