‘Non-passage of bio-safety bill threatens food security’

Lamenting the non-passage of the bill as a guest on Radio Nigeria network news recently in Abuja, the Director General of the National Bio-technology Development Agency (NABDA), Professor Lucy Ogbadu, said if the bill is not passed, the agency will not be in a position to contribute fully to food and nutrition security in the […]

Lamenting the non-passage of the bill as a guest on Radio Nigeria network news recently in Abuja, the Director General of the National Bio-technology Development Agency (NABDA), Professor Lucy Ogbadu, said if the bill is not passed, the agency will not be in a position to contribute fully to food and nutrition security in the country through improvement of yield and nutritional content of farm produce.
Speaking during the chat monitored by our reporter, Professor Ogbadu said NABDA has contributed to food and nutritional security in the country over the years by producing improved planting materials with better yield, adding that the agency can do more but it was constrained by the bill.
The director general noted that early passage of the bill will enable the agency to deploy modern agricultural bio-technology methods to introduce vitamins and proteins into crops in order to boost food and nutrition security in the country.
Daily Trust findings showed that Nigerian farmers labour year in year out to get an average of only two tonnes per hectare of crop yield, while their counterparts in other parts of the world are getting more than 10 times of our farmers output as a result of high yielding hybrid seeds, standard fertilisers application and other favourable factors.
Our reporter gathered that while Nigerian farmers are lamenting the unavailability of good quality, high yielding seeds, seedlings and standard fertilisers among others in the country, seed and fertiliser authorities, private seed and fertiliser companies keep claiming that standard seeds and fertilisers are available to increase yield.
One of the farmers spoken to on the issue of poor yield, Mr. Joshua Danladi, is very worried by the situation, and urged concerned state actors and non-state actors alike to collaborate and come up with better hybrid seeds and fertilisers to enable Nigerian farmers get more yield per hectare and to compete favourably with their foreign counterparts.
It is instructive to note that even as the government says Nigeria’s food import bill is decreasing, the country is still largely food import dependent, spending billions of dollars annually and enriching foreign farmers. This trend, experts say, is tied to very low output per hectare from Nigerian farms and must be checked to ensure food security is achieved in the country.