North West leading in Irrigation-Minister

North West leading in Irrigation

The Minister of Agriculture and Natural Resources, Chief Audu Ogbeh, has commended the North West  geopolitical zone of Nigeria for leading in irrigation practices, services and techniques, thereby making all-year farming activities a possibility in the geopolitical zone.


While other geopolitical zones need to improve their irrigation practices and expertise, the state governments need to partner the Federal Government towards boosting agriculture at the rural level, according to the Minister.

Chief Ogbeh, who made the call during a media briefing with journalists in Abuja, said that as a means to meeting the nation’s high demand for food, the Ministry of Agriculture is set to launch the second phase of its Agro-Mechanisation Programme in Ilorin, and the sector in the next five years needs a minimum of one million tractors to support farmers in their endeavors.

The Minister also said that the ministry was targeting clearing more lands and threshers as well as embarking on quality control and certification of crops towards curbing the embarrassment of the rejection of Nigerian produce in the international market. In addition, he stressed the need to collaborate with the Ministry of Water Resources, which builds dams for the needs of agriculture,and added that the present government was also lobbying banks to take a fresh look at their interest rates, as paying back loans at an average of 18-25% interest is unrealistically high for farmers.

“If the interest rate is not reduced, we would continue to have challenges in agriculture,” he said.

He assured that the government was not only expecting to benefit from the programmes of the Africa Development Bank (AfDB), but also from other agricultural support agencies, towards ensuring support for the development of agriculture programmes in Nigeria. He said that agro-industrial parks are also in the works, and assured that such parks will be viable platforms for generating employment and curbing rural urban migration.

The Minister further lamented a situation where there was only one extension worker to about 10,000 farmers, and stressed the need to increase the nation’s extension personnel. Ogbeh further revealed that the Labour Intensive Family Enterprise (LIFE) programme, which was conceived to ameliorate the sufferings of the people,intends to reduce the challenges of women farmers, who make up more than 50 per cent of the nation’s agricultural population.

Meanwhile, while inaugurating a committee for the development of the Agriculture Road-map, the Minister stressed that the present administration will not sit idly while watching agricultural resources go to waste.