Centre boosts Nigeria’s agric productivity with initiative



Worried by the nation’s growing population which may trigger food and humanitarian crisis, the International Centre for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT), Monday, announced a partnership with Alluvial Agriculture, a collective farming business grouping thousands of smallholders in Nigeria aimed at enhancing agricultural productivity.

CIAT Regional Director for Africa, Dr. Debisi Araba, and Alluvial Managing Director, Dimieari Von Kemedi, signed the agreement on behalf of the parties at the Feed Nigeria Summit, the biggest annual gathering focused on this nation’s frontline role in addressing global food security holding in Abuja.

Nigeria, currently the world’s seventh largest country, is at the epicenter of the risk associated with higher population in Africa, and will overtake the US as the third most populous nation by 2050, according to a 2017 report by the UN’s Department of Economic & Social Affairs.
 
While poverty has reportedly been falling across the developing world, food shortages have been rising, as evidenced by increased malnutrition rates since 2014.
The summit, which started on Monday, is geared towards facilitating strategic engagement between the private and public sectors, as well as other critical stakeholders in the agricultural sector to hatch homegrown solutions to challenges confronting the nation’s agriculture.

Alluvial is tackling systemic problems that leave most African smallholders in poverty and threaten food security across the developing world by aggregating farmers to create a nucleus of minimum efficient scale and the necessary education, mechanisation, inputs and market access.

Speaking on the partnership, Dr Araba said Alluvia’s direct engagement with various value chain actors, including farmers, provides CIAT with a conduit to rapidly disseminate agriculture innovations acquired and developed through partnerships and activities around the world.

With the agreement, CIAT provides Alluvial with the know-how, monitoring and evaluation framework to ensure that the investment in Nigeria is globally competitive and environmentally sustainable, and ensures that the investment is able to evolve and respond to market signals.
 
“Together, CIAT and Alluvial plan to establish a replicable model for scaling up adoption of agricultural technologies and innovations to improve livelihoods across the food value chain and foster environmental sustainability of agricultural development.“This partnership is poised to support and benefit all value chain actors, including those working in the production, distribution and consumption hubs of the food system,” he added.