The Minister of Agriculture and Food Security Abubakar Kyari says the country is expecting a bumper harvest before year-end.
Food inflation has reached 40 per cent according to data from the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS), pushing the prices of essential commodities beyond the reach of millions of Nigerians.
But Kyari said the Federal Government has measures in place to address the situation including ramping up farming which would increase food production.
“It [bumper harvest] is about October-November this year. That’s when we are going to have the harvest. We are expecting a bumper harvest baring any natural issues,” Kyari said on Channels Television’s Sunday Politics,
“Well, I am just giving you the assurance that we will have a bumper harvest,” he said.
According to him, one of the reasons for the acute food shortage in the country at the moment is also linked to seasonal reasons.
“The season we have here is a critical issue we have in agriculture. This is what we call the lean season and this is between June-July and the next harvest,” the minister said.
Apart from this, Kyari attributed the food shortage to other issues such as reduced landmass, flooding, and others.
“The shrinkage of land mass for agric, flooding, habitation problems, and insecurity…An ageing farming population; younger people are not going into agriculture now,” he said.
Kyari said the government is further ramping up moves for mechanised farming with the distribution of fertilizers to farmers and efforts to purchase tractors.
“We have ordered. It’s not like chewing gum; you can’t buy it off the shelf. I went to Belarus and ordered 200 tractors and 9,000 other implements,” the minister said on the current affairs show.
“The basic implement for farming in Nigeria is a hoe, which is archaic and antique. That’s why we are talking mechanisation,” said Kyari.
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The real problem militating against food security in the country is the inability of the government at all levels to mobilise farmers to feed the nation. In the absence of agriculture machinery, improved agricultural seeding, adequate security of the farmers, lack of incentives to farmers particularly the young farmers to produce crops and misappropriation of the ministry of agriculture’s appropriation Act at all levels of government. What’s the agriculture’s budget in the past twenty years used for. Government at all levels has to get serious about tackling the problem of insecurity and the herds destroying the farmers crops internationally without consequences.