Nigeria meets Millennium Development Goals food target two years ahead of schedule

NIGERIA has met her Millennium Development Goals (MDG) in food production by halving the number of hungry people in two years ahead of the scheduled 2015 deadline as agricultural output in the country has ballooned to 15m tonnes.

 

Currently the world's sixth largest food producer, Nigeria is fortunate to have thousands of acres of arable land and subsequently the scope to expand agriculture significantly. As part of the MGDs, Nigeria, like most other developing nations was set several targets with regards to production and the provision of infrastructure.

 

At the Millennium Summit in September 2000, world leaders adopted the United Nations Millennium Declaration, committing their countries to a new global partnership to reduce extreme poverty and setting out a series of time-bound targets, with a deadline of 2015 known as the Millennium Development Goals. MDGs are the world's time-bound and quantified targets for addressing extreme poverty in its many dimensions-income poverty, hunger, disease, lack of adequate shelter, and exclusion-while promoting gender equality, education, and environmental sustainability.

 

They also include basic human rights such as the rights of each person on the planet to health, education, shelter, and security. Although Nigeria is yet to meet the goals in all these other areas, she met and surpassed her food production targets.

 

Sonny Echono, the permanent secretary in the Federal Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development,  he said the ministry distributed 738,305 tonnes of fertilisers to farmers last year under its Growth Enhancement Support Scheme (Gess) to achieve the goal. He was speaking in Abuja during the launch of the Establishment and Implementation of Fertilizer Quality Control System in Nigeria, an initiative supported by the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa.

 

He added: “As we all know, the current agricultural policies have made tremendous inroads in the fertiliser sub-sector especially in curbing the corruption in the distribution of fertiliser to our resource constrained farmers through the use of e-wallets in the administration of subsidies.  As a result of the Gess, 121,522.8, 525,509.48 and 738, 305.80 tonnes of fertiliser were redeemed by farmers nationwide in 2012, 2013 and 2014 respectively."