Babcock Varsity Don Suggests Measures for Sustainable Food Security

Funmi Ogundare​

A professor of Plant Breeding and Genetics, Cyril Nwangburuka, has called on the government to incentivise growers of African Indigenous Vegetable Crops (AIVCs) to guarantee sustainable production and thus ensure food security in the country.

Nwangburuka made the call recently while delivering the 40th Babcock University inaugural lecture and called on government and private sectors to intensify efforts through research to prevent further genetic erosion and extinction of the AIVCs, adding that they have nutritional and medicinal values.

“Institutions such as the National Centre for Genetic Resources should be well funded being a national centre for collection and preservation of genetic resources,” he stated.

According to Nwangburuka, there is a need to enhance AIVCs’ potential via crop improvement to achieve food security, sustainable health and poverty eradication, adding that the AIVCs can provide the huge underutilised natural food resources, which can conveniently complement the already existing food system if molecular and morphological tools are available for their genetic improvement.​

He said the AIVCs remained the panacea for poverty alleviation in Nigeria if their huge diversities were urgently harnessed.

“Collaboration between the indigenous communities and the conventional plant scientists would produce a synergistic outcome and significantly address health issues in African communities using AIVCs,” he stressed.