Kaduna — At the moment, agriculture is not commercially viable in Nigeri, former governor of old Kaduna State, Alhaji Abdulkadir Balarabe Musa has said.

He told Weekly Trust that it is difficult to make ends meet from agriculture today. This, he said, is largely due to the massive and mindless importation of food into the country coupled with the amount of corruption involved.

While he blamed government policy of privatization which he said brought about withdrawal of subsidy on agriculture as one of the factors responsible for low quality of agriculture as an enterprise, he emphasized that "even those countries whose economic system we attempt to establish like America and other western countries massively subsidise agriculture.

"During the second republic, Kaduna State Government funded an agriculture project in conjunction with the World Bank called Funtua Project. When we came into leadership, we appraised the project and found it inappropriate in many ways, found it to be very neo-colonial in concept and in practice, so we abandoned it and introduced a state wide agricultural project but since after our tenure in 1984, the project has been abandoned, even the fertiliser storage system has been abandoned," he lamented.

The agricultural sector, Balarabe stated, can be revived with a patriotic government.