In furtherance of its robust drive to strengthen the state's capacity for agriculture-driven development, Kwara State Governor, Abdulfatai Ahmed, will today, inaugurate the Kwara Agriculture Modernisation Plan Team that will fashion out a five-year master plan for the Kwara State Agricultural City (KSAC).

The eight man team which comprises three professors of Agriculture from Cornell University, New York and their counterparts from the University of Ilorin and Kwara State University, KWASU, as well as Abayomi Ogunshola, Senior Special Assistant on Investment Promotion, Policy and Strategy to the Governor, is mandated to fashion out a five-year master plan for the Kwara State Agricultural City (KSAC). KSAC is designed to establish Kwara State as the agricultural hub in the West African sub-region by building on the state's strengths in the sector.

It would be recalled that in its effort to revolutionalise agriculture in Kwara State, the government of Olusola Saraki created Shonga Farms as a “Special Purpose Vehicle” in order to gain financing from five banks through debt and equity financing options. He made contact with the Commercial Farmers Union of Zimbabwe.

By 2004 a memorandum of understanding had been signed, and by 2005, after the state stepped in to clear land and provide fertilizers and insecticides, 13 Zimbabwean farmers were running five dairy, four poultry and four mixed farms in the new Shonga project, each with 1,000 hectares of land under a 25-year renewable lease. The impact of the farmers was transformative.

The 'Shonga' farms now employ up to 4,000 people at harvest time. Crops include maize, soya beans, rice, peas, bananas, ginger and pineapples, and crop yields are increasing every year: rice yields are more than double the national average of 1.5 tonnes per hectare, maize, at five tonnes per hectare far exceeds the national average of 1.2, while on what is now Nigeria's largest cassava farm 40 to 60 tonnes per hectare of crop are produced a year, as compared to the national average of 12 to 15 tonnes.

Shonga is home to a factory which is Nigeria's largest exporter of processed cashew nuts and the largest milk producing dairy farm of its kind in the country. Other terms of reference, according to Ogunshola, is to design strategies to exponentially raise agricultural productivity in the state, harness Kwara's agricultural endowment through the application of science and technology to agricultural processes and raise agricultural output to enhance the economic, food and nutritional security of the people of Kwara State and Nigeria.

Ogunshola added that the team is also required to outline ways of creating an enabling investor friendly environment to attract high impact foreign and local investors and entrepreneurs capable of unleashing the state's agricultural investment potential as well as generate massive jobs and wealth creation opportunities for Kwarans.