The Federal Government is to tackle poverty in the North East and North West geopolitical zones through agriculture by releasing a new variety of high-breed sorghum that will increase the yield of farmers in the regions.
Dr Adewumi Adesina, the Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development, made this known on Friday, while speaking with journalists in Yola.
He said that the high-breed sorghum variety, which would be released next year, would increase sorghum yield per hectare for farmers in the regions from 0.5 tonne to 2.5 tonnes, reflecting a 500 per cent increase.
``That increase will give us 2.3 million metric tonnes of additional sorghum,’’ he said.
The minister stressed the sorghum cultivation’s transformation project would generate more earnings for farmers in the regions, while enabling the government to utilise the surplus soghum yield for beverages’ production and its school feeding programme, among others.
Besides, Adesina said that processing plants would be sited in northern parts of the country to process sorghum, soya beans and maize into high-value products.
The minister, who also spoke on cotton and rice production, said a new variety of cotton seedlings would be released to boost cotton production and create job for over one million people by 2015.
Adesina, who is on a two-day working tour of Adamawa, said that his ministry would collaborate with the Federal Ministry of Water Resources to rehabilitate the country’s river basin authorities to undertake massive irrigation of rice farms, as part of the Federal Government’s rice production project.
The minister, who stressed that Nigeria could no longer afford to depend on other countries for food, noted that the country annually spent N356 billion on importing rice, N17 billion on sugar imports, while N97 billion and N635 billion were spent every year on importing fish and wheat respectively .
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