By Gabriel Ewepu – Abuja
The Director General, Nigeria Agribusiness Group, NABG, Dr Manzo Maigari, said all stakeholders must rise to fight climate change affecting farmers’ productivity with climate -smart agriculture to sustain the food system.
Maigari stated this on the heels of a two-day Workshop on Developing a National Framework for Climate-Smart Agriculture with theme ‘Cleaner, safer, rewarding agriculture’ held from in Abuja.
He said it is incumbent on farmers, donor agents and government to take Climate-Smart Agriculture seriously, because of the value it adds to productivity and the potential to reduce the risks faced by farmers via climate change.
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He said: “The whole idea is to be able to come up with a draft document that nourishes your resilience document that has been developed by the Federal Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development.
“This is to support 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 and 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.
“We will bring all the farmer associations, Nongovernmental Organizations, Government together, and we will embark on an awareness campaign where we will embark on a reorientation for farmers to know all of the procedures and problems.”
He also advised that, “So we must either stop or begin to imbibe practices that cause very minimal damage to environmental systems, natural environmental systems so that it is sustainable in order for the environment to be regenerative enough for us to hand over something to our children.”
He added that use of fertilizers, felling trees, burning grasses and trees, and other harmful agricultural practices cause disruption of the environment including saturation of carbon that causes climate change affecting farmers’ productivity.
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