The Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development, Dr. Akinwumi Adesina has assured that the federal government is dtermined to do way with food importation in the nation.
Dr. Adesina made this known while speaking at the National Presidential Initiative on Youth Employment in Agriculture Programme (YEAP) in Abuja.
According to him, ” our taste for imported food items has also contributed to high levels of unemployment for our youth”. He also added that ” with every grain of rice we import, we export jobs to youths of the country we import from”.
He explained that the number of youths that entered the workforce between 1991-2000, was 15 million, then from 2001-2010, the number grew by 50 per cent to 22 million.
The minister maintained that,”No sector has greater capacity to create jobs as quickly and sustainably as the agriculture sector”.
Dr. Adesina the reason the Federal Government was engaging in this youth employment programme was to create 1 million young agricultural entrepreneurs in Nigeria by 2015.
He further said that the Federal Government was working hard to make the Nigerian Agriculture to be competitive in today’s global agricultural markets. With this, Dr. Adesina said “we must rapidly mechanise our agriculture”.
He said this was important in the sense that it would attract youths into agriculture. The Minister regretted that Nigeria has less than 20,000 functional tractors, which he described as the lowest tractorization rates in the world.
He maintained that there was need to design a comprehensive system that facilitates a strong relationship between financial institution, tractor manufacturers, tractor vendors and all other relevant bodies.
Dr. Adesina called on Nigerians to adopt the farm approach used 50 years ago by chief Obafemi Awolowo to address this,” it will be helpful to look back the approach used 50 years ago by Chief Awolowo”, he said.
The Minister said that Chief Awolowo established the farm settlement scheme to achieve food security at regional and national scale.
He said there was need to modernize the farm settlement, stressing that it would reduce rural-urban migration.