By Kelechukwu Iruoma

PROFESSOR Carolyn Afolami of the Federal University of Agriculture, Abeokuta has called on the Federal Government to focus its attention on rapid industrialization to reduce unemployment for sustainability national development.

Delivering the 47th Inaugural Lecture of the university titled: Multidimensional Poverty Alleviation in Nigeria and National Development: The Inseparable Siamese Twins, Prof. Afolami revealed that rapid industrialization could be achieved by giving agriculture its pride of place by engendering good policies, particularly, those that would make agriculture attractive to the teeming unemployed youths in the country.

She also lamented that despite the effort made at the national and international; levels to eradicate poverty and hunger in line with the Millennium Development Goals, about 1.2 billion people, which constitute about one eighth of the the world population still live in extreme poverty around the world. The Prof. Of Agricultural Economics described poverty as; “synonymous to not having a job or a means of livelihood creating the fear of the future and having to live from hand to mouth as a result. Poverty is losing a child to a curable and preventable illness brought by unclean water or inability to afford medication.”

Poverty is powerless: it is the lack of representation and freedom. She however revealed that as a way out, agriculture remained the key to industrialization and national development and therefore could liberate the country from its precarious situation in that Nigeria was yet to tap fully into the benefits acruable in agriculture still remain very low, contributing less than 10 percent of the nation’s economic output.