The federal government through the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development, has put plan in place by establishing an online portal to register 10 million farmers and ensure efficient and effective monitoring of Federal Government intervention in the Agric sector.
The Minister, Alhaji Muhammad Sabo Nanono, stated this on Thursday during the opening ceremony of the 44th council meeting of the National Council on Agriculture and Rural Development (NCARD), held at the International Conference Centre, in Abuja, adding that the initiative would capture the bio data of the farmers and link it with geographical information of their farmed plots, crops and the volumes of production in the country.
Nanono also said although the initiative was initially set out to capture the data of 2.4 million farmers across the country, but that the results from the exercise have encouraged the Economic Sustainability Plan Team to expand the data capture to 10 million farmers.
He said the database will be a platform for the Federal Government interventions going forward, putting an end to ghost schemes and other unscrupulous practices in the agricultural industry.
Nanono noted that: “a major hallmark of our agricultural interventions is inclusiveness. We have catered for the youths, women and many demographic considerations in our implementation strategies.
gap intervention ,we launched the Agric for Food and Jobs Program ,originally conceived as an input loan for smallholder farmers across several commodities including maize ,rice ,cotton ,groundnut ,sorghum ,cowpea ,soybean ,sesame ,cassava and oil “ palm.
The challenges brought by the emergence of the COVID – 19 Pandemic, floods and insecurity has galvanized the government into setting up necessary structure to address infrastructural deficiency, technology gaps, security challenges and extension inadequacy. This approach is believed to be the right one for achieving our desired economic diversification and national development,†he said.
In his remarks, the Minister of Federal Capital Territory Administration (FCTA), Alhaji Mohammed Musa Bello, represented by the Special Assistant, Prof. Mohammed Usman, said that the theme of this year’s Council meeting ” Agriculture and Food Security in the face of COVID – 19, Floods and Insecurity is apt enough and a reminder to the effect that we are yet to win the fight on COVID – 19 Pandemic.
