Senior Special Assistant to the President on the Millennium Development Goals, Dr. Precious Gbeneol has enjoined farmers who got free fertilizers during the official launch of the agricultural empowerment program for rural farmers across the country by the MDGs Office to ensure the judicious use of the input.
In so doing, there will be an improvement in the way they live and it will further bolster their productivity and contribute to the realisation of the MDG’s goals.
She said agriculture remains the foundation for the attainment of most of the eight MDGs goals as the nation depends on it to provide good nutrition, economic empowerment and household income especially among the rural people. And so, agriculture has received a priority attention from government thus making Nigeria to surpass an unprecedented 60 per cent sufficiency in rice production.
United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) recently described this feat as capable of raising world rice output to a record high in 12 months. “Ultimately, this has culminated in meeting more than 50% of the nutritional needs of the country. This led the FAO to certify Nigeria as having attained the hunger target of the MDGs way ahead of the 2015 deadline” the presidential aide said while attributing the achievement to the success of several programmes implemented in order to enhance food security.
The MDGs Office, in collaboration with the Federal Ministry of Agriculture, implements high impact interventions at the grassroots since it was established that eradication of extreme poverty and hunger is central to the efforts to attain all the other MDGs. This collaboration has led to the improvement of the value chains of more than ten crops, with capacity development for women and youth as well as the provision of basic farm infrastructure and agricultural inputs.
Beyond support to ministries, departments and agencies (MDAs), the MDGs Office is implementing an innovative Conditional Cash Transfer Scheme, which adopts a multi-faceted approach in its engagement with the issues of hunger and poverty reduction.
This scheme engages low-income households across in the states with the provision of N100,000 as a seed grant to start up an agricultural enterprise as an exit strategy from the scheme. The condition for the release of this sum is the completion of 3-month training in an agricultural business. In addition, the MDGs Conditional Grants Scheme is funding agricultural cooperatives in local government areas across the country, which is structured to address targeted value chains in the different regions that demonstrate the greatest marginal return in the output of agricultural produce.
In a remark at the launch, wife of the President, Dame Patient Jonathan commended the organisers of the event because the exercise will have great impact by improving the economic landscape of rural communities. She reiterated her resolve not to give mere commendation only, but that under her leadership, the Women for Change Initiative sees an opportunity in contributing its quota to ongoing efforts by government to improve primary production.
According Dame Patient, phased distribution of about 230,000 bags of fertilizers were being done across the states in a way that removes middlemen to ensure these bags of fertilizers reach the intended beneficiaries.
She further expressed appreciation to farmers for their important contributions to agriculture in the nation. “More certainly when the task of tilling the ground and producing agricultural products is a difficult one especially in our context where resources are limited, where mechanized farming is uncommon, where storage facilities are scarce and where farmers do not get the needed support that they deserve. In the face of all these constraints, farmers have stayed the course and have been consistently dutiful in their chosen vocation”.
Concluding, she said “I have been reliably informed that the growth and ongoing improvement in our economy is mainly driven by the contributions of the agricultural sector, I am indeed glad to be a part of such an undertaking”.