Kano – Stakeholders in the agriculture sector on Wednesday in Kano, called for urgent solutions to the current tomato crisis and the high cost of food in the country.
The stakeholders, who spoke at a stakeholders’ workshop on: “Targeting Interventions to Foster Sustainable and Resilient Food Security in Northern Nigeria”, said not much attention had been paid to agriculture by successive administrations.
Hajia Salamatu Garba, the Executive Director, Women Farmers Advancement Network, noted that the tomato crisis would have been averted if proactive measures had been taken.
“We must stop the quantity of food that we are losing. More than one-third of what is produce is lost. Some months back, you were almost stepping on tomatoes.
“People were begging us to buy tomatoes. A basket of tomatoes could be bought for N100. But we didn’t preserve, we didn’t keep anything.
“Now, we are in the hunger season, tomato has gone. It is a lesson for us to learn to put processing factories close to our production centres,”she said.
According to her, food losses are mostly due to inadequate storage, technical know-how, production facilities, poor investment and infrastructure.
She also called on government to ensure that agriculture policies are friendly to the farmers.
Garba also urged measures to be taken to increase food production so as to ensure food security within the available land resource and other competing factors against food production.
Also speaking on the tomato crisis, Prof. Emmanuel Oladipo, a professor of agriculture, called for measures to increase food production and reduce food imports.
Oladipo, who is a Consultant with the Global Environment Facility, explained that a Nigerian farmer usually had little or limited access to fertilisers, and preservation or storage facilities.
“Average prevalence of food inadequacy and domestic food price volatility between 2,000 and 2013 were 12 per cent and 13 per cent respectively.
“Food imports despite its abundance of arable land resources, about 11 billion U.S. dollars in 2012,”Oladipo said.
The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports that the programme aimed to promote the sustainable management and resilience of ecosystem as a means to address food insecurity. (NAN)
