As the Federal Government of Nigeria continues to pursue, rigorously and relentlessly, its policy of agriculture for food and jobs for Nigerians, more avenues are being opened to aid the monitoring of the agricultural interventions that have taken place since the government began the drive.
Yet again, the Federal Government has launched a brand new online portal to ensure efficient and effective monitoring of all of its interventions in the agricultural sector. Alhaji Muhammad Nanono, the Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development disclosed this in Abuja, at the 44th council meeting of the National Council of Agriculture and Rural development (NCARD).
The new initiative, he said, will collect the bio data of the farmers and connect with geographical information of the cultivated plots, crops and the outputs of agricultural production in the country. The government, he further stated, initially collected the date of 2.4 million farmers across Nigeria and the result from the exercise encouraged the Economic Sustainability Plan Team to widen the data collection to 10 million farmers.
According to him, the database will be the platform for subsequent federal government interventions to bring to an end the fake schemes and dishonest practices in the agricultural industry. The minister clarified that the hallmark of the government’s agricultural interventions is about carrying everybody along, saying that the government has catered to the women, youth and other demographics in the application strategies.
The Agric Food and Jobs Program was initially designed as an input loan for smallholder farmers across various commodities including maize, rice, cotton, groundnut, sorghum cowpea, soybean, sesame, cassava and oil palm.
Now, what are the partner organisations involved in the Federal Government Agric Interventions?
The federal government of Nigeria is in partnership with the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), Commodity Associations, and Agricultural Platform Companies. This is in order to have effective facilitation. The environment believes the partnership will not only increase food production greatly but also assist in the off-taking of produce while offering input at reduced price because of the economy scale.
Conclusion
With the launch of this new portal, farmers in Nigeria can look out for more of Federal Government’s agricultural interventions in Nigeria. There is, in fact, no better time to be a farmer in Nigeria than now. We encourage you to always keep a date with this website as we bring you more important information that would help you grow.