Dr. Effiom Oku, a lecturer at the University of Abuja’s Department of Soil Science, has urged governments in Sub-Saharan Africa—including Nigeria—to prioritize climate-smart agriculture education in order to increase food security and address insecurity, which is endangering crop production.
In an interview with AgroNigeria, he made this claim and stressed the value of climate-smart agricultural education in boosting regional food security. Most notably, crop production in Sub-Saharan Africa—particularly Nigeria—is impacted by the problems associated with insecurity.
In his words “Governments across Sub-Saharan African, SSA, countries including Nigeria need to combat and arrest insecurity that is preventing farming (crop production) in many communities across the continent.
“Climate information and low-input land restoration technologies for deforested and degraded land must reach every smallholder farmer. Action in the form of government policy and relevant support is needed to restore more land, better and faster. Local communities, entrepreneurs (including the private sector), young people, and graduates of agriculture are to be firmly in the lead.
“The National University Commission (NUC) curriculum of training agricultural graduates in Nigeria, past, present and the new under construction does not recognize climate change from 100 Level to 500 level. This must change for our universities to train climate smart graduates to drive crop and animal production. Also, be able to guide smallholder farmers as extension officers in a changing climate and under increasing extreme climate events.”
Speaking further, he stated that agricultural research and funding in the past 30 years have been on increasing productivity with only 5 % towards reducing post-harvest food losses and this must change in order to increase food productivity and post harvest losses.
In Africa, smallholder farmers produce 80% of food consumed in Sub-Saharan Africa, SSA, and they suffer from the losses. The World Food Programme, WFP, of the United Nations recognized that post-harvest losses contribute significantly to food insecurity in Africa.
