Don Urges Nigeria To Embrace Agric

A university teacher, Prof. Ndowa Lale, has said that the dependence on oil by Nigeria as its economic mainstay was dangerous.

Prof. Lale who spoke as key speaker recently in Yenogoa, the Bayelsa State capital during the Nigerian Environmental Society NES AGM/Annual Conference said except Nigeria diversifies through agriculture and other sources, “if our oil wells dry up, we would find ourselves in a dangerous situation”.

He said if the United States and any other advanced nations of the world discovers an alternative to oil then the country will be in trouble.

On the practice where large economies like the US and others emit carbon and the developing economies compelled to trap them through carbon trading by maintaining green forests, the Professor of animal and environmental biology said the process rewards the largest polluters and allows them unnecessary leverages.

He said carbon trading was a false solution and undermines individual responsibility even as he said recent statistics of 1 dollar per hectre per year as at 2012 was worrisome.

“The thing is that the Americans are waiting for us to produce organic products for them.

“What we are doing is not and we are trying to provide food and not there yet. “We need to reduce our carbon offering on the scene to enable us do that and we need to eradicate poverty protect and enhance the natural environment resource base that we have”, he said. He further explained that the green economy was not a state in itself but a process of transformation and a constant dynamic progression.

He said the nation’s forests were under utilized even as he said 20 per cent of plants in the forests were not yet discovered due largely to the dependence on oil.