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Showing posts with label agricultural innovations. Show all posts
Showing posts with label agricultural innovations. Show all posts

Monday, March 9, 2015

Africa must innovate to open up agriculture potentials – FARA


NaijaAgroNet
The Forum for Agricultural Research in Africa (FARA) and the German government ended a two-day forum in Nairobi by declaring that the continent must embrace agricultural innovations to become globally competitive in bio-economy, reports NaijaAgroNet.

Kenya’s Cabinet Secretary for Agriculture Felix Koskei, told participants that one of the key ingredients to growth in the agriculture sector is attributable to development of technology that fails to be aligned to the needs of the client and effectively fails to compliment national and institutional goals’ aspirations.

NaijaAgroNet reports that particularly, Koskei noted that innovations should be self-perpetuated or be taken up by commercial entities and business the innovations are expected to yield immense socioeconomic benefits and impact productivity income and sustainability of the environment for the small holders.

“Despite this huge resources and potential, this continent together with other developing countries are host to 852 million hungry residents who require constant support,” Koskei noted.

According to Rhoda Tumusiime, Commissioner for Agriculture at the Africa Union, “Africa must feed itself and in fact this initiative of scaling up innovation is very critical. One world no hunger Africa should have no hunger because we have the capability, the land the people but as you have also heard only 50 per cent of agriculture productivity is contributed to by innovation.”

The executive director, FARA, Yemi Akinbamijo,lamented that “Money is not everything; by the way because we have spent more than 150 billion US dollars, about N29,925 trillion, in the last three decades and we are still where we are and we are spending 50 billion US dollars to borrow foods.”

Cyriacus Nnaji/ GEE
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