Agriculture extension services not an all comers affair- Agency
The National Agriculture Extension and Research Liaison Service (NAERLS) has cautioned against indiscriminate extension services as it sought regulation of the practice.
The former publicity secretary of the agency, Mr Ismail Olawale, made this call in an interview in Lagos state.
He said regulation of extension services through licensing was one of the expectations from the new Minister of Agriculture and Food Security.
According to him, we are the highest ranking official public extension institution in Nigeria, though other agricultural research institutes have extension units.
“It is the schedule of duty that all these other extension units collaborate with the NAERLS to carry out extension services adequately throughout the country. The expectation for the new minister of agriculture and food security is to first find a way to checkmate the proliferation of extension services of the private organizations. It is one of the big challenges NAERLS is going through .
“The issue is that most of these private institutes are awarded license by the regulatory authority and they may not know the extent of damage that the unchecked private extension agencies may do to the agric. sector,” Olawale said.
In addition, he said that unchecked private extension services could do more harm to the agriculture sector than good.
“Today, there is so much information outside concerning agriculture, which are churned out by these private extension agencies that usually go behind to collaborate with either state government or they just key into one or two senatorial district development interventions.
“It is very sad that in most of these programmes, the collaborators do not get back to NAERLS to find out exactly what to do, things we have done, things on ground, the knowledge base of our farmers, things that are expected of our farmers to do, and the real problem on ground.
“Another expectation from the new minister is to make sure that extension work is regulated in line with the national mandate.
“We will also want him to make sure that the national policy on extension programmes is quickly passed from the second reading to become a Law.
“We insist that NAERLS needs to have input in any extension activity that will take place in Nigeria.We are not saying private extension should not exist but they need to understand that they must link up with us all the time. It is not a matter of collaboration, we must always support what they do and they must get some certification from us,” the expert said.
According to him, there is an ongoing conference due to end this month in Abuja, it is about extension operated by private organizations but this organization has gone ahead to collaborate with the FMARD and some sponsors without telling NAERLS.
“It is an aberration because some of the information that can go on to our farmers are harmful, especially when throughout the whole world, countries are being careful of how they adopt agricultural bio – technology, especially the genetically modified organisms or crop .
“There is no country in the world that is not taking precaution in adopting these modern agriculture technologies.We do not have the database or record of activities of some of these private extensions agencies. So, if government asks us about the activities of these private extension agencies, we have nothing to give to them because they bypass us,” he added.
NAN / Foluke Ibitomi
