In bid to tackle the food security challenges facing the nation, federal government has said it planned the immediate production of 31 metric tonnes of grain.
It said the plan was aimed at achieving food sufficiency and global food security.
Speaking at a high level stakeholders’ forum on seeds systems development in Northeast Nigeria held at the Transcorp Hotel, Abuja, the Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development, Senator Abubakar Kyari, said the Ministry of Agriculture and Food Security outlined series of critical pathways to solve the food security challenges in the country.
“These pathways are streamlined into short term, intermediate and long term actions for a four-year plan which include among other plans the immediate production of 31 million metric tons of grains in 2024 towards achieving food sufficiency and global food security.
“For success to be achieved, factors to be addressed are the seed availability, affordable and adoptable to the climatic conditions with comparative advantage paying particular attention to food security major crops like rice, maize, wheat, cassava and sorghum in 2024 to be able to achieve this we require about 312,555.69MT of seeds which is to enable us achieve the required metric tons of grains’’, he said.
The minister, who was represented by the Director, Food Reserves and Strategy, Dr Haruna Suleiman, the situation called for immediate prioritisation of certification of available planting material for some food security crops to be supported by the FMAFS – National Agricultural Growth Scheme and AgroPocket Scheme (NAGS-AP) project to support with quality seeds for rice, wheat, maize and cassava and other inputs at a subsidised rate.
“Of great interest is the new science, technology, and innovation (STI) developed by the USAID Feed the Future Nigeria Integrated Agriculture Activity implemented by IITA a ‘Community Based Seed Enterprises Model’ that is not only localize but adoptable to the communities climatic and specific condition and above all against the traditional approach of demand driven which have not been effective. The NIAA model is market driven and on need based riding on cohesive cooperatives system to create the needed ownership and stewardship to protect the enterprises.
“This model developed and promoted by IITA- NIAA was piloted in the Northeast – Nigeria in the states of Adamawa, Borno, Gombe and Yobe building an ecosystem and end-end market driven seed network through the community based system to produce seed to a network linked farmer groups aggregated within the communities with the LGAs, this by extensions makes the availability and adoptable and specific resilient seed to the ecology of the locations concerns”, he said.
FG Plans Immediate Production of 31m Metric Tonnes of Grains in 2024
