Federal Govt Sets Up Committee To Drive FAO’s HiH Initiative Towards SDGs

The Federal Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development yesterday inaugurated a committe with the responsibility of formulating a coherent workplan and implementation of the Hand in Hand (HiH) initiative in a bold step to tackle the slow trends in achieving the Sustainable Development Goals(SDGs) targets of reducing extreme poverty and hunger.

The evidence‐based, country‐led and country‐driven initiative Committee which was launched in 2019 by the director-general, Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) Qu Dongyu is chaired by the minister of agriculture and rural development, Dr Mohammad Mahmood Abubakar with composition of a National Steering Committee and an Inter-Ministerial Task Team.

Inaugurating the Committee in Abuja, the minister said the focus was to manage natural resources, reduce disaster risk, strengthen food security and enable economic diversification in line with the FAO country programme Framework 2018-2022 for Nigeria as well as the successor framework for 2023-2027.

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Specifically, the programmme plan captures the priority agricultural commodities of rice , sorghum, soybean, maize, fish, tomato, cassava and dairy.

According to the minister, the states selected for the programme include Katsina, Borno, Niger, Cross River, Ebonyi, and Oyo, along ‘social track’, as well as Kano, Ogun, Kaduna, Anambra, Rivers, Bauchi and Kwara, along ‘economic track’.

He explained that the selection of states for the intervention was based on their potentials for import substitution, export promotion, comparative advantage, social inclusion, and demand gap both national, continental and global.

The permanent secretary in the ministry, Dr Ernest Umakhihe said, the ministry will continue to align and strengthen collaborations amongst the government and non-government institutions for the overall development of agriculture in the country.

In his remarks, the FAO representative in Nigeria ECOWAS, Fred Kafeero stated that FAO priority was to support Nigeria to strengthen national food and nutrition security through enhanced nutrition, improve efficient and sustainable management of natural resources and ecosystem amongst others.