Embrace Climate-Smart Agriculture, NABG Urges Stakeholders

The Nigeria Agribusiness Group (NABG) has reiterated the need for stakeholders in the agricultural sector to reduce climate change impact on agribusiness with Climate-Smart Agriculture approach.
Director-General of NABG, Dr Manzo Maigari, who stated this  during a  two-day workshop on “Developing a National Framework for Climate-Smart Agriculture” in Abuja, noted that  the workshop was an eye opener.
Maigari told The Tide’s source that it had become incumbent on all stakeholders to embrace climate-smart agriculture.
He said this was because of its added value to productivity and its potential to reduce the risks faced by farmers due to climate change.
Maigari advised that stakeholders should imbibe practices that have minimal damage on natural environmental systems to make it  sustainable.
“So, we must either stop or begin to imbibe practices that cause very minimal damage to environmental systems, and natural environmental systems so that it is sustainable.
“In order for the environment to be regenerative enough for us to hand over something to our children,” he said.
Maigari said farmers in Nigeria needed to adopt Climate-Smart Agriculture as solution to crop cultivation, mitigating post-harvest losses, improving crop yields and restoring soil nutrients due to climate change impact on the ecosystem.
He said the  use of fertilizers, felling trees, burning grasses and trees and  saturation of carbon leads to disruption of the environment, which caused climate change affecting farmers’ productivity.
On tackling climate change in the agricultural sector, he said, “it would bring all the Farmers Associations, Non-Governmental Organisations  and government together, embarked on an awareness campaign to re-orient  farmers to know all the procedures and problems.”
Maigari noted that the idea of having a National Framework for Climate-Smart Agriculture was to be able to come up with a draft document that nourished the resilience document that had been developed by the Federal Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development.
“The whole idea is to be able to come up with a draft document that nourishes your resilience (to climate change) document that has been developed by the Federal Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development.
“This is to support and  enrich that document, that resilience framework from Federal Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development, such that it can be upgraded into a policy document that can be approved by Federal Executive Council.
The programme was themed, “Cleaner, Safer, Rewarding Agriculture”.