The President of SASAKAWA Africa Association (SAA), Makoto Kitanaka, has said that Nigeria needs to adopt a more digital approach to agriculture if it is to address its food insecurity.
Mr Kitanaka, who said this in a chat with journalists at the weekend in Abuja, added that digitalising agriculture will enhance farmers’ yield and move them out of poverty.
With its establishment in Nigeria three decades ago, SAA has built the capacity of over eight million smallholder farmers and over 20 million value chain actors of maize, soya beans, rice, wheat, tomato, sorghum, and millet directly and indirectly.
Kitanaka, who is on a working visit to Nigeria, noted that with its work in about 18 states of the federation, SAA is building the capacity of small farmers to be able to engage in agriculture productively.
Dr. Kitanaka said: “There are so many farmers groups in Nigeria that still lack digitalisation.
“We would like to introduce our new technology to facilitate the visions of the farmers.
“There is a lot of information in the market, and the focus is that farmers should always know the real information in agriculture.
“So, we are working for farmers to go to the market so that they will understand the price of the current situation and then how to buy crops to produce or when to sell”.
On his part, the SAA Deputy Country Director, Dr. Abdulhamid Gambo, said Sasakawa is impacting community based facilitators with skills that cascade down to the farmers thereby eliminating their dependence on the government.
