Food Security: Oyo Government, society partner to combat weeds on water ways

The Oyo Government has expressed interest to establish a synergy with the Weed Science Society of Nigeria to combat the challenges of weeds on food security occasioned by impacts on water ways and other decaying antiquated infrastructures in the state.


This was made known by the Hon. Commissioner of Environment and Natural Resources, Rt.Hon. Kehinde Ayoola in his speech during the opening ceremony of 47th Annual Conference of the Weed Society of Nigeria held at the First Bank Building, Faculty of Agriculture,University Of Ibadan recently.

Rt. Hon Ayoola acknowledged the weed challenges as a serious problem negatively impacting on the state’s food productivity and infrastructures citing  the land scape along secretariat road purposely designed to abate flooding in the area, the fish pond on the same road, the Eleyele water works which was meant to produce and supply 28,000 tonnes of water daily to people on daily basis cum the lake between Eleyele and Apete which already had been taken over by weeds over the years as very few examples worthy of mentioning.   

He thereby urged the weed society to come up with solutions that would address these challenges through his office. 

In his welcome address, the President of the Weed Science Society of Nigeria, Prof.M.G.M. Kolo impressed on the need for more capacity building in the proper management of weeds  adding that universities must be courageous to employ more scientists for better result to be achieved in crop production research stressed that the gap between scientists and farmers must be bridged through technologies transfer for best weed management and control for higher food productivity.

Kolo said it is not enough for scientists to conduct researches and publish in journals for promotion alone, but must ultimately bring the outcome of the researches to the farmers who would use this on daily basis in their Agricultural practices adding that new finding on weed should be made available to farmers in order to know the latest technologies that are available for controlling and managing weeds to increase food productivity.

In her remarks, the wife of the Deputy Governor, Dr. (Mrs) Hamdalat Olaniyan observed that the main limitation to food production in Nigeria is weed challenges pointed that ‘’once we are able to solve the problem of weed ,eighty percent of the food production challenges would have been solved’’

Mrs. Olaniyan advocated for  appropriate funding of research on weed management for the purpose of achieving food security stressing that  many researches in the universities especially in the University of Ibadan are personally funded thereby calling on all tiers of Government to expend more fund on research innovations.