Editorial - Need to evaluate Research Institutes infrastructure to ascertain level of funding

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.