Agriculture As An Accelerator For African Economic Sustainable Development

Agricultural sector has been identified as the engine room for economic transformation for most African countries, which plays an important role in their economic transformation process via huge revenue generation, employment creation, source of foreign exchange and food supply to mentioned a few. The impact of agriculture sector on Africa countries economic growth has become a significant area of study. The main focus of this paper is to investigate the impact, explore the possibilities and highlight the teething challenges that have masked the significant roles of agricultural sector in the transformation process of the Nigeria’s economy from transforming from a developing one to advanced nation. This paper span from the period 1970 to 2010 by using annual times series data. The Ordinary Least Square (OLS) estimation method was adopted to examine the impact of agricultural sector in the economic growth of Nigeria. The variables employed include: Gross Domestic Product (GDP), output of agricultural sector, share of agriculture in the GDP, index of agricultural production, and ratio of agricultural output to GDP. The results of the analyses showed that the Nigeria agricultural sector contributes immensely to the economic growth of Nigeria but the over-dependence on the oil sector has over shadowed the potentials of the sector. In conclusion, some of the recommendations made in the study are that: the Nigerian agricultural policy needs to be evolved; there is need for national re-orientation towards agriculture or farming, the activities of agriculture financing, institutions in providing finance and credit for rural farmers, should be supplemented with the provision of road networks, rail system and warehouses, in order to further encourage farmers to increase their production etc.