From Okwe Obi, Abuja
Worried by the spate of hunger, agriculture sector stakeholders recently gathered to brainstorm on how to initiate what they called “climate-smart agriculture” to improve food productivity, create jobs and fight poverty in Nigeria.
Led by the Nigerian AgriBusiness Group (NABG), the experts identfied the sector’s problems at a two-day workshop in Abuja with the theme, “Cleaner, safer, rewarding agriculture”, while resolving to develop a national framework on climate-smart agriculture.
NABG’s President, Emmanuel Ijewere, said the scheme intends to promote agribusiness advocacy for smallholder farmers’ project otherwise termed the SSPs project.
Ijewere noted that the three-year programme is funded by the Bill Gates Foundation under the policy advocacy to drive the scale and inclusion of smallholder farmers in Nigeria and improve food security in the country.
According the him, “climate-smart agriculture is extremely important because the climate of the world is changing and every country has specific responsibility to adjust to the changes.
“So, the whole idea of putting this together is to ask ourselves these questions in advance and to put in place a framework that will enable us address these issues. The damage has already been done to the climate. Now it is a question of living with those damages and mitigating them.
“At the end of the day, it is how to increase the yield, improve the soil, improve the environment and reduce the poverty of the people to ensure food security and to help in the diversification of the Nigerian economy.”
He added that another benefit would be creation of a sustainable agricultural framework to give youths an opportunity to work and reduce importation of food, while using the land more efficiently through technology. Director General of NABG, Dr. Manzo Maigari, urged stakeholders to key into the initiative because of the value it adds to productivity and the potential to reduce the risks faced by farmers.
“It is important in the sense that farmers have been losing productivity from their land without knowing exactly what the issues are. The impact of climate change is insidious that farmers do not realise because it is difficult to pin it down.
“However, what is important here is that most of the practices smallholder farmers engage in are unsustainable and they don’t know that these practices harm them,” he said.
In addition, NABG Council Member, Muhammadu Abubakar, assured Nigerians of a bumper harvest through climate-smart agriculture with minimum efforts.