The Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development, Alhaji Sabo Nanono, has called for a greater involvement of the youth and women in agriculture.
Nanono made the call Tuesday in Abuja at the “Debriefing of Outcomes of Socio-economic Surveys in Nigeria’’ led by the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT) and its partners.
He said that there was a need to tackle the micro level value chain being practised in Nigeria by improving on it to help engage more youths and women in agriculture.
“I hope this meeting will also address the link between agriculture and industrialisation and look at the value chain by looking at a higher level of value chain.
“We have to start thinking along that line and see how we can remove a large number of youths from our streets.
The minister said Nigeria needs to look at crops with good potential to create jobs for the youth and for export such as soya bean and sesame seed.
Nanono called on women to wake up and come out of their closets, be aggressive and proactive in participating in farming business.
The minister said though sorghum was becoming an industrial problem the seeds planted in Nigeria were not standardised.
He advised that the issue should be addressed through education and massive orientation programmes to enable the people to understand the importance of standardising sorghum.
The Country Representative, ICRISAT, Dr Hakeem Ajeigbe, earlier in his remarks said seven major socio-economic studies were recently conducted in Nigeria on sorghum, pearl millet and groundnut, to assess the impacts of the technologies that had been disseminated in the past 15 years.
