Kwara Farmers Receive Guidance On Climate Information

The need to optimise climate information provided by NIMET has been identified as a way to improve agricultural yield to tackle food shortages in the country.
This was made known at a one-day agriculture stakeholders workshop on improving provision of climate information services to farmers organised by NIMET in partnership with the Human and Environmental Development Agenda (HEDA) in Ilorin.
Speaking at the programme, the executive secretary of HEDA, Arigbabu Sulaimon, said that the importance of climate information services to farmers in the country can not be over emphasised, adding that climate change has worsened food crises and poverty situation in Nigeria.
He said that the annual seasonal Climate Predictions and other forecasts from NIMET to the agriculture sector are parts of critical efforts in building the resilience of smallholder farmers in Nigeria.

Sulaimon, who said that it is important for stakeholders to improve dissemination of data other and forecasts from NIMET for the agriculture sector, added that it is expected that the desired outcome of these activities would help generate the much-needed baseline for our work in the sector in 2022 to 2025.

This programme is important to food security our agriculture is climate-independent. That is why we do seasonal farming. Our farmers need the rain. If the farmers don’t get the right information at the right time they often lose. We are coming in to mobilize stakeholders on how to properly optimize climate information being provided by Nimet to empower our farmers so that we can build resilience into our food system especially food production.

“Amongst other things government should help farmers to do is to access climate information and to help research institutions to respond to climate change through information so that they can help the farmers and for their efforts not go to waist and we would not have food shortages as we are currently experiencing”, he said.

Nigerian Tribune