Oyo State is set to partner with the Consultative Group for International Agricultural Research (CGIAR), the world’s largest publicly-funded agrifood research network, which has the International Institute for Tropical Agriculture (IITA) as one of its research centres, on advancing the cassava and cocoa value chain.
Sandra Milach, Chief Scientist of the CGIAR and the Deputy Director-General of the IITA, Bernard Vanlauwe, stated this on Friday, shortly after a meeting with the Oyo State Governor, Seyi Makinde.
She noted that the state has great potential in agriculture and that having invested in processing and value addition, it will benefit from the partnership, which is aimed at developing plans on how to advance cassava and cocoa value chains.
Speaking with newsmen shortly after the meeting, which had in attendance the Director-General of the Oyo state Agribusiness Development Agency (OYSADA), Dr Debo Akande; and the Senior Executive Assistant on General Duties, Chief Bayo Lawal, Milach noted that the partnership would enable Oyo state, as one of the major producers of cassava and a state with potential in cocoa production, to understand what is important as well as the bottlenecks of the value chains the state is working on and how it can be assisted to find solutions.
She added that the CGIAR will work hand-in-hand with the Oyo State Government to help to understand and come up with solutions on the processing industry’s roles in helping farmers adopt better varieties of cassava and cocoa, and connecting the value chain from end to end to ensure food security, boost agribusiness and uplift farmers.
“We know Oyo State is one of the major producers, and it is also investing in processing and value addition. And we talked about cocoa.
“So, these are the two crops that IITA has a lot of expertise in. And we have agreed to develop plans together with the governor Seyi Makinde on how we can advance both value chains,” Vanlauwe said.
Earlier, Milach said that the partnership would help the state to bolster its achievements in agribusiness development, as, according to her, science has an important role to play in raising the value proposition of agribusiness.
She said, “In CGIAR, we are really on this mission of asking the question, how can we turn all the science we do into a real value proposition, real business? We see a very important role in our science to help raise the value proposition of business.”
Addressing how the partnership will specifically help people in agribusiness and farmers seeking economic empowerment through agriculture, Milach added, “First of all, we need to understand the problem we are trying to solve.”
In the conversation with the governor, we saw that the chance is very real of how we produce cocoa in Oyo State and Nigeria and how to produce more. Understanding that chance is the first step.
“But it is equally important to understand within the cocoa production value chain what the bottlenecks are because sometimes, you can have science and technology, but the bottlenecks will slow everything down.”
The delegation was led by the Director-General of IITA-CGIAR, Dr Simeon Ehui.
