Ogun State Governor, Prince Dapo Abiodun, has said that the state government would be setting up a commodity exchange to boost investment in the agriculture value chain.
This was disclosed in an advertorial signed by the state governor on Wednesday, stating the palliative measures that the government had put in place following the removal of fuel subsidy by the Federal Government.
The Punch reports Abiodun as saying, “The state is also establishing a commodity exchange to ensure optimisation of current and future investment in the agro-allied sector of the economy in line with President Bola Tinubu’s war on food insecurity.”
The removal of fuel subsidy has increased the hardship of Nigerians as a result of the hike in the prices of goods and services.
The Securities and Exchange Commission had in the past stated that the commodity exchange was part of the implementation of the capital market master plan and part of the strategies to foster a thriving commodity-trading ecosystem, over the next few years.
The master plan designates commodities’ exchanges as critical for enabling investment diversification, risk management, price discovery, and transactional efficiency.
The Director-General, SEC, Lamido Yuguda, had said that commodities’ exchanges would create jobs and facilitate economic development among other benefits, adding that such exchanges were critical to enabling investment diversification, risk management, price discovery, and transactional efficiency.
Yuguda stated that commodities’ exchanges had the potential to efficiently link commodities to industries, thereby creating jobs, improving living standards and unlocking the economic potentials of farming communities, promoting rural development, enhancing financial inclusion of smallholder farmers, and ultimately facilitating economic development, among other benefits.
He said the Technical Committee on Commodities Trading Ecosystem had in 2017 developed a roadmap for the actualisation of a vibrant commodities’ ecosystem.
