The Minister of Agriculture and Food Security, Abubakar Kyari, has assured Nigerians that the country is expected to witness bumper harvest soon.
He said, “It [bumper harvest] is about October-November this year. That’s when we are going to have the harvest. We are expecting a bumper harvest barring any natural issues. Well, I am just giving you the assurance that we will have a bumper harvest.”
The minister stated this on Sunday during an interview on Channels Television’s Sunday Politics.
According to him, Nigeria would soon overcome its present food shortage and inflation, which has reached 40 per cent, as shown in the data from the National Bureau of Statistics.
Kyari revealed that the Bola Tinubu government has measures in place to address the present food inflation and increase food production in the country, saying that the country is expecting a bumper harvest before year-end.
The minister added that some of the reasons for the acute food shortage in the country are seasonal reasons, reduced landmass, flooding, and others.
“The season we have here is a critical issue we have in agriculture. This is what we call the lean season, and this is between June and July and the next harvest.
“The shrinkage of land mass for agric, flooding, habitation problems, and insecurity…An ageing farming population; younger people are not going into agriculture now.”
Kyari said the federal government is further ramping up moves for mechanised farming with the distribution of fertilizers to farmers and efforts to purchase tractors.
He added, “We have ordered. It’s not like chewing gum; you can’t buy it off the shelf. I went to Belarus and ordered 200 tractors and 9,000 other implements,” the minister said on the current affairs show.
“The basic implement for farming in Nigeria is a hoe, which is archaic and antique. That’s why we are talking about mechanisation.”