The damages done by incessant floods to crops and the danger it poses to availability of food items will not upstage the planned massive production of food in the country. Minister of Agriculture and Food Security, Senator Abubakar Kyari, gave the assurance in Abuja. He sympathised with thousands of farmers whose farms were destroyed by floods in the country but said the government is confident that the country will exceed the food sufficiency target of 2024.
Senator Kyari’s assurance is a backdrop of the recent figures released by the National Emergency Management Agency (NEMA) indicating that more than thousands of hectares of farmlands were damaged with more than forty thousand people displaced by the flood in the country.
These statistics by NEMA seem to threaten the present food security in the country, however, the minister assured of sufficiency stating that
“We will meet our food security target despite the losses, we will intensify efforts in dry season farming to cover the losses”.
Kyari said the development is worrisome and will hurt the social and economic well-being of the rural farmers, especially the small-scale farmers. He said, “As we witness the devastation caused by the recent flooding in our agricultural heartlands, my thoughts turn to the hardworking farmers whose livelihoods have been swept away by the unforgiving forces of nature. The impact of this will be felt on the anticipated harvest this year, though we are hopeful it will have minimal effect on national food security.”
Kyari, on X social media platform, sympathised with the farmers who lost their crops as a result of a dry spell that lasted for weeks in some states in the North-Central, North-East, parts of the North-West, and South-West while urging for the investment in technologies and practices that empower our farmers to adapt to a changing climate and safeguard their livelihoods against unpredictable weather patterns.
In addition, he said the government will give more emphasis on the 2024/2025 dry season farming to cover the losses recorded as a result of the flood, stating that “We have constituted a committee already between the staff of the two ministries and key players working on ways to achieve the objectives of increasing food production through dry season farming.”
