IMPROVING AGRICULTURAL BUDGET TO ENHANCE RURAL DEVELOPMENT IN NIGERIA
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Abstract
This study examines the trend of government funding of agricultural sector through annual budgetary allocation alongside other sectors of the economy. Further more, the contribution of agriculture to national economic development was equally analyzed in order to justify the need for better funding of the sector. In so doing the methodology adopted was the theoretical analysis of the available secondary data. The study revealed that, the impact of agriculture in the area of employment generation was enormous as it accounted for between 75% and 45% share of employment generation in the country between 1990 and 1999. respectively. The study further revealed that government funding of agriculture was rather too low between 1991 and 1998 as the budgetary allocation to agriculture in any particular year was never more than 5% of the total budget. It even went to as low as 1.8% in 1994 while the highest was 4.2% in 1991. Furthermore, in 1999, 2000 and 2001 it received 5.1%. 1.9% and 2.25%. respectively. All these are obvious evidence of neglect suffered by the sector in the area of funding. U was therefore recommended that to enhance agricultural output, the sector needs to be better funded (in order to develop simple farm equipment for cultivation, harvesting, processing and storage) so as to bring about a noticeable improvement