Engineer Seeks Proper Funding Of Agric Institutions

Irked by the over depen
dence on oil, an agricultural engineer, Mr. Umor Ekpelu, has advocated proper funding of Agric institutions in the country.
Ekpelu, who bared his mind while speaking to our correspondent last Monday in Port Harcourt said the Federal Government should give priority attention to tertiary institutions in the country that were agriculture based.
“Universities of agriculture in the country should be given special attention in terms of funding in order to activate the research base of such institutions”, he said.
According to Ekpelu, agriculture was viewed highly in the developed world and even in most African countries and wondered why Nigeria should lag behind.
The University of Science and Technology, Port Harcourt, trained agric engineer said the Transformation Agenda Programme of the Federal Government if not politicised was capable of delivering positive results.
He expressed the hope that by the time the agriculture sector was relied on through research in the agric universities across the country, by funding them adequately, more students would be interested in offering agriculture in such universities.
He decried the poor enrolment in agriculture in the various universities and attributed the development to the total breakdown of machinery and equipments at the various agriculture institutions in the country.
Explaining further, Engr. Ekpelu, said experience has shown that students who opt for studying agriculture in Nigeria universities were regarded as those from poor homes.
On the massive importation of staples like rice and other food items from foreign  countries, Ekpelu, who described the development as “unfortunate” said the trend could be reverse if appropriate measures were taken through looking inwards.
He further explained that there was no crop that the country imports that could not be produced in large quantity as he asked, “what happened to our rice farms at Abakiliki, groundnut up North and cocoa in the West”.