NIRSAL acquires 10,000 hectares for wheat farming in Jigawa – In a bid to boost Wheat Farming activities, the Nigeria Incentive-Based Risk Sharing System for Agricultural Lending (NIRSAL) has acquired 10,000 hectares of land in Jigawa.

The NIRSAL National Coordinator, Wheat Project, Mr Olu Anyo, made the disclosure during land preparation for the project at Hago village in Hadejia.

According to Anyo, the move will boost wheat farming activities in the state and the country for food sufficiency and also increase farmers’ income.

He said that the organisation had earmarked N285,000 for cultivation of each hectare, saying that the money would be paid to the farmers in form of farm inputs and not cash.

The NIRSAL boss said that part of the organisation’s mandate was mobilizing funds for agribusiness.

“We mobilize finances for Nigerian Agribusiness by using credit guarantees to address the risk of default.

“We also reduce the cost of borrowing by agricultural producers from commercial banks,’’ Anyo said.

In his speech, the state Wheat Project Coordinator, Alhaji Muhammad Idris, said the cultivation area would cover Ringim, Miga and Hadejia Local Government Areas.

He said that 100 tractors had been acquired for clearing the land along the Hadejia valley.

The NIRSAL was launched in 2011.

It was incorporated in 2013 by the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) as a dynamic, holistic 500 million U.S. dollar public-private initiative to define, measure, price and share agribusiness-related credit risks.

The goal of NIRSAL is to trigger an agricultural industrialization process through increased production and processing of the greater part of what is produced to boost economic earnings across the value chain.

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