It is no more news to say agricultural research Institutes are poorly funded with only 30% of the total budget annually going into pure research while the rest seventy percent are given to administration, thereby making the core mandate of most of these institutes not very effective as they supposed to have been.
A visit to many of the Institutes
will unveil the appalling state of these
facilities that are meant to make research activities very effective
towards food security, but which many of them are not working due to lack of
maintenance or repairs from little or huge damage or even replacement with a new one.
We are particularly concerned and
bothered on this situation confronting our research institutes in view of many
challenges confronting food value chains system in the country that include
climate change impacts, unstoppable increasing population growth and recently
the appearance of COVID 19 with all its new protocol that have negatively
affected our present and future food security with a need to speedily come up
solution of injecting improved technology to increase productivity.
This observation of ours was as well
complimented at a function recently organised by Federal College of Animal
Science and Technology, Moorplantation, Ibadan by the Executive Secretary (ES)
of the Agricultural research Council of Nigeria (ARCN) Prof. Garba Sharubutu
who said that there is need for an effective evaluation of Nigerian
agricultural research institutes who had mandate to various crops in their
different ecologies to ensure availability of improved technologies that would
commercially enhance food productivity with less drudgery.
Sharubutu went further that the
evaluation would be able to give insight into the magnitude of the level of funding
that is actually required in these institutes adding that only God knows when
such evaluation is being carried out last in Nigeria.
This call from the ARCN ES has confirmed
the need for this evaluation in order to first ascertain the level of the
functional research facilities in these institutes that are still relevant to
research work in order to get a clear picture of fund that would be released to
these organizations for effective performance that will be able to mitigate
climate change impacts, growing population and COVID 19 effects on sustainable
food productivity system. The repositioning presently going on the ARCN worth
commendation towards research development as an overseeing agency for the
agricultural institutes and colleges in the country.
Our dream to achieve sustainable food
value chains system commercially will be a mirage if the repositioning of our
research institutes with cutting edge technologies and facilities to enable
them make available improved technologies with efficient functioning facilities
that can be used to mitigate climate change challenges being put in place, and the time is now with the
involvement of all the tiers of government as agriculture is on concurrent list
of financial support.
Again all the end users in the
private sector must be interested in giving their financial support that will
be able to uplift research development through more funds availability to pure research and
ensuring transferring of the improved technologies to farmers through efficient
extension services in the country, and until all these is done that the issue
of value chains foods sustainability system’s challenges will be put behind us.
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