An international Con sultant, Dr. David Atte, has said the establishment of land banks will boost farming.
Land bank is a development finance institution which mandate is to support, promote and facilitate the development and transformation of the agricultural sector.
According to him, the availability of investible agricultural land — whether by location, tenure security, land rights, ownership, infrastructure or size — is critical to transforming agriculture from low productivity subsistence-based to high productivity mechanised modern agriculture.
For this, he noted that the creation of land banks to facilitate the acquisition of land for commercial agricultural investment is important since the objective is to improve the overall enabling environment for inclusive commercial investment in agriculture.
For this to succeed however, Atte said the Land Use Act would have to go. This is because land ownership is a thorny issue with agricultural land in the hands of the government.
He said farmers still grapple with the challenge of landlessness and inequality of land ownership, adding that there are lots of useable uncultivated fertile land.
He said repealing the Land Use Act and scaling up land registration would improve agriculture.
He added that the government would also need to strengthen the system to handle the proposed land banks, since it possesses the legal mandate for custody of deeds records, registers, accounts and others.
As modernising agriculture remains the overarching theme of the country’s agriculture policy as well as the new private sector development strategy, he aligned with the objective of improving the investment climate for agri-business and developing inclusive private-public partnership.
According to him, the land bank has an important role to play in helping to grow the number of sustainable emerging farmers who are entering the commercial space, while continuing to support commercial farmers, thereby ensuring they remain competitive.