The Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development, Dr Akinwumi Adesina, has assured that Nigeria was set to meet its food target by 2015.

In a statement made available to LEADERSHIP yesterday, the minister was speaking at the World Food Prize Symposium and Borlaug Dialogue in the USA  recently.

According to the minister, “At the beginning of this second Borlaug Century, and for the first time in decades, there is today a strong political will to modernise and industrialise Nigeria’s agriculture sector.”

Akinwumi in his keynote address said, “I know the road map toward that vision for Africa is challenging. It is for Nigeria as well. But as Africa’s most populous country, and soon to be its largest economy, we are using the power of agriculture to create jobs, increase wealth, and promote private enterprise to ensure that growth is sustainable.

“To unlock the combined potential of some of the fundamentals needed in the major transformation of Nigeria’s agriculture sector, the change has to be across the entire value chain – from field to mill to table,” he said.

The minister assured that “our focus would be on creating eco-systems in which small, medium and large-scale farmers would not only co-exist, but also flourish together. We would do more than plant new fields. We would also create value-added foodstuffs from our staple crops through an aggressive import-substitution programme and policies that would encourage new investment in food production and promote agriculture sustainability and resilience.”