The Vice-Chancellor of the Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife, Osun state, Professor Simeon Bamire on Tuesday attributed the persistent hike in food prices in the country to the high cost of fertilizers and insecurity.
He affirmed that the high cost of fertilizer and other factors is presently affecting food sufficiency across the country thereby leading to hike in the prices of food items.
The Vice-Chancellor made these known at the annual stakeholders meeting of the African Agri-food Knowledge Transfer Partnership Programme (AAKTP), held at the OAU Conference Centre in Ile-Ife.
The project was held in partnership with the University of Lincoln, UKRI Innovate, and Temophadis International Enterprise to help agri-businesses to grow, secure food security, and exportation of Nigerian products.
The university also argued that indiscriminate hike of food prices will become history once, “government embark on massive food production and level of poverty will drop significantly”
Professor Bamire stressed that massive food production will enhance healthy competition that could eventually lead to price stability and control.
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According to him, “massive food production will naturally pull people out of poverty, enhance healthy rivalry, force food prices down and ensure stability due the surplus of agricultural products.”
“We are doing our best within the university system to ensure that we involve the industry to ensure we go beyond just the food products process and go through the value chain to be able to meet up with the need of our people.
“The goal of the project is to help address food security and reduce food waste/losses by improving the supply of foods via e-platforms and building the capacity of agri-food vendors in the country through Knowledge Transfer.
“Training of Trainers (ToT) will help to scale out the outcome of this project to a wider network of agri-businesses in Nigeria. The selected Agri-business will also have the opportunity of showcasing their products during this stakeholder interactive session (the exhibition will hold tomorrow at the Faculty of Agriculture, OAU).
“Apart from the transformation of the agri-food processing recorded, the project (through the Obafemi Awolowo University) has been able to provide job opportunities for two of our graduate students working full time on the project.
Some of our students (10 Undergraduate, 1 Master, and 1 PhD student) will be awarded financial support (tuition support) to facilitate their engagement in training relating to agricultural cooperative partnership- a sort of town and gown interaction, he added.
The students that are awarded are Abolade Olaitan, Gbolahan Barakat, Soremekun Sofiat, Adegbite Grace, Akande Rodiat, Ademiloye Moyo, Kazeem Kaosarat, Akinola Mercy, Olude Deborah, Oyegbemi Lawrence.
