The All Progressive Congress (APC) National Chairman, Abdullahi Adamu, has asked Nigerians to brace up for tougher times, as the high cost of food items in the market would continue to increase to the end of 2022 and early part of 2023.
Adamu, who stated this yesterday in Tudun Wada, Nasarawa State, at the opening ceremony of the 14th National Agricultural Show, lamented that Nigeria’s National Food Reserve is not sufficient to cushion the effect of high food inflation that the nation is currently grappling with.
Adamu, represented by Kabir Ibrahim, the President of All Farmers Association of Nigeria (AFAN), harped on the need for smallholder farmers to be provided with incentives to encourage them to embark on all-year-round farming to feed Nigeria’s teeming population.
He said: “The turbulence in prices of food items, or food inflation, as the experts say, is at an all-time high today and would be higher towards the end of this year, 2022, and the early part of 2023.
“As it is, our food reserve is not such that it can cushion the effect of inflation and since every country in the world is at this time on its own, the Nigerian small-holder farmer, who is responsible for feeding the ever increasing population of our nation, ought to be incentivised to produce all-year-round by adopting climate smart agriculture, deploying systems of crop intensification, agricultural biotechnology and good agricultural practice, which uses less chemical fertilisers.”
Adamu, who is also the Chairman, board of trustees of the National Agricultural Foundation of Nigeria (NAFN), pointed out that the surest way of reducing poverty is through investment in the agricultural sector, adding that “no amount of investment in this sector is too much but must target the real farmers.”
He advised that all interventions in the agricultural sector from the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), the Federal Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development (FMARD), and the states and Federal Capital Territory must be channelled to real farmers, otherwise there would be no food sufficiency in Nigeria.
