Climate change: Africa Leaders Must Deploy New Agricultural Technologies
The Executive Director of the Forum for Agricultural Research in Africa (FARA), Yemi Akinbamijo, has called on African leaders to deploy new agricultural technologies to mitigate erratic weather patterns and changing climate.
According to him, agriculture can play a big role in greening Africa’s economies and doubling productivity without further degrading the physical environment. He noted that innovations around rice, cassava, aquaculture, ruminant livestock and poultry, fodder agronomy, pulses, dryland cereals, general agricultural practices, bioengineering, and biofortification were technologies that could be adopted to boost agricultural production.
Speaking on the exploits of the Consultative Group of International Agricultural Research (CGIAR), a global agency that unites international organisations engaged in research about food security, he said the organisation was focusing on innovations around the agricultural value chain. On the role of research in increasing agricultural productivity,
he said, “There is no doubt that the CGIAR has been playing a pivotal role in supporting developing nations, especially over the last fifty years, to meet this food and nutrition security challenge by helping to rapidly increase agricultural production and productivity, particularly in Africa where these indicators lag behind the rest of the developing world.”
He pointed out that the challenges in the agriculture sector were not only about food and nutrition security, noting that the sector must be developed to contribute to the sustainable economic growth and development of the nation and serve as a means of providing gainful employment.
“It is clear that to attain the much-needed economic transformation, food and nutrition security, the agriculture sector must contend with increasingly erratic weather patterns, changing climate, the pandemic and now the crisis in eastern Europe,” he added.
source Agro Nigeria:
