The Nigeria Agribusiness Group (NABG) has called on stakeholders in the agricultural sector to reduce climate change impact on agribusiness with climate -smart agriculture (CSA) approach.
CSA is regarded as an approach for transforming and reorienting agricultural development under the new realities of climate change. It helps guide actions to transform agri-food systems towards green and climate resilient practices.
Director-General of NABG, Dr Manzo Maigari, made this call on the side-line of a two-day workshop on “Developing a National Framework for Climate-Smart Agriculture” in Abuja.
The theme of the workshop is: “Cleaner, Safer, Rewarding Agriculture”.
Maigari disclosed that it had become incumbent on all stakeholders to embrace climate-smart agriculture.
He said this was because of its added value to productivity and its potential to reduce the risks faced by farmers due to climate change.
Maigari advised that stakeholders should imbibe practices that have minimal damage to natural environmental systems to make it so that it was sustainable.
“So, we must either stop or begin to imbibe practices that cause very minimal damage to environmental systems, and natural environmental systems so that it is sustainable, and for the environment to be regenerative enough for us to hand over something to our children,” he said.
Maigari said farmers in Nigeria needed to adopt climate-smart agriculture as solution to crop cultivation, mitigating post-harvest losses, improving crop yields and restoring soil nutrients due to climate change impact on the ecosystem.
He said that the use of fertilisers, felling trees, burning grasses and trees and saturation of carbon lead to the disruption of the environment, which caused climate change affecting farmers’ productivity.
On tackling climate change in the agricultural sector, he said it would bring all the farmers associations, non-governmental organisations and government together, and “embarked on an awareness campaign to re-orient farmers to know all the procedures and problems.”
Maigari said the idea of having a National Framework for Climate-Smart Agriculture was to be able to come up with a draft document that nourished the resilience document that had been developed by the Federal Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development.
“The whole idea is to be able to come up with a draft document that nourishes your resilience (to climate change) document that has been developed by the Federal Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development.
“This is to support and enrich that document, that resilience framework from Federal Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development, such that it can be upgraded into a policy document that can be approved by Federal Executive Council.
“This will enable us mainstream climate-smart agriculture in all spheres of the Nigerian society, whether private or public, or the informal sectors with this climate-smart agriculture,” Maigari said.
The initiative championed by NABG is to ensure a sustainable agricultural framework is established, which is inclusive where Nigerian youths would have opportunity to get involved in food production.
By Doris Esa
