Kaduna-based agricultural expert and entrepreneur, Sadik Falalu, has called on our teeming youths to take the abundant opportunities in agriculture by addressing hunger and poverty prevailing in our country.
He made this known during the 2nd annual distributors and suppliers conference of Falgates Rice held in Kaduna at the weekend.
Speaking on the theme “Empowering our Youths in Agriculture: The opportunities and Challenges”, Falulu who doubles as Managing Director of Falgates Rice, noted that even with the vast land in abundance in the country, the teeming youths saw farming as an old fashion or a poor man’s job, adding that most young Nigerians want a white collar jobs forgetting the opportunities in agriculture.
“I want to tell them there’s alot of opportunities in farming if only our teeming youths understand.”
To this end, he called on the youths to start farming especially now that eating three square meals is becoming difficult in most houses.
Speaking on the challenges, Air commodore, Illiyasu Yahaya rtd, noted that even though most people were of the view that funding is one of the major challenge to start farming, he was of the view that the absence of skills is a major factor.
“First you have to have the interest and then learn the skills before starting up a farm. You can start with a small portion of land,” he said
Another expert, posited; “there can never be national security without food security, if you do not have food security your national security is compromised”.
He said that was the reason advanced countries of the world such as the USA,spend a lot of money to subsidy to their farmers.
“Currently despite all the efforts in agriculture, Nigeria is spending about 6.5 billion Dollars annually in exporting food.We are only about 210 million people…. so it means that in another 7 years we’ve to spend about 13 billion Dollars per annum to import food, unless we do something to prevent that.”
He said one of the solutions was harnessing the very vibrant youthful population that Nigeria has, for agricultural purposes since many youths today are beginning to have interest in agriculture.
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