Food Crisis: Prioritise Agric Sector, Don Urges FG

A lecturer at the Nnamdi Azikiwe University, Awka, Prof. Raphael Okigbo, has called on President Bola Tinubu led administration to pay more attention to the agricultural sector with a view to addressing the food crisis in the country.

Okigbo, a professor of Plant Pathology in the Faculty of Biological Sciences, said this in an interview with the News Agency of Nigeria in Awka on Wednesday.

He said the scarcity and high price of food items had demanded a deliberate effort to address the challenges in the sector.

The don blamed insecurity and high cost of transportation as the bane of food security in Nigeria.
Okigbo advised the federal government to open the country’s borders to importation of healthy food items in the short run to increase their availability and push down prices.

According to him, we are not producing enough, our farmers both men and women, can no longer enter the forest to farm because of insecurity; the government has to address the problem.
“Again, the cost of moving produce from the farm to where they are needed has more than quadrupled; this is another harmful effect of removal of petrol subsidy.

“All this explains the scarcity of food items and their high prices where you find them.

“So, I want to say that the government should design a good and urgent policy to address the challenges in the agricultural sector,” he said.