The Federal Government on Monday urged the state and local governments as well as international development partners to support the new National Food Security programme towards achieving the Millennium Development Goals of halving poverty by 2015.

Part of the new strategies, it stated, include promoting the establishment of fertilizer manufacturing plants and expanding the national gas grid to afford locating the plants close to the agricultural farms.

The Minister of Agriculture and Water Resources, Dr. Sayyadi Abba Ruma, who said this at the emergency meeting of the National Council on Agriculture, in Abuja, stressed that strategies were aimed “at transforming the agricultural sector in Nigeria to meet internal food requirements and produce considerable surplus for export.”

In a bid to achieve the objectives of the strategy, Ruma said government would “promote large scale commercial agriculture of about 500 – 3,000 hectare farm sizes, targeting a total of about six to 10 million hectares over a period of four years.”

According to him, the President Umaru Yar’Adua administration had identified agricultural sector as a strategic sector to address “the multiple challenges of achieving a broad-based economic growth, creating wealth and employment, reducing poverty, attaining national food security as well as putting Nigeria among the 20 world leading economies by the year 2020.”

He said, “Government plans to develop an agricultural land mapping programme. Our aim is to develop self-sufficiency strategies for food crops, with the first phase covering wheat, sugarcane, cassava, tomatoes, fisheries and livestock.

“We also aim to increase storage capacity by completing 25 on-going silo projects and construction of 60 specialised warehouses in the country; constructing 12 condition centres, two for each geographical zone of the country.”

Ruma further stated that government was embarking on certification of individual farmlands to title deeds to serve as bank collateral for access to credit and support services. This process, he added, would be completed over a period of three years.

The minister noted that agriculture in the country was still facing a number of challenges, as majority of the farmers still depend on subsistence agriculture for their livelihoods.

Source: Punch