National Project Coordinator,Agro-Climatic Resilience in Semi-Arid Landscapes, Abdulhamid Umar; Assistant representative,Food and Agriculture Organisation , Abubakar Suleiman; Country Director, HarvestPlus Nigeria,Dr.Yusuf Dollah; Head, National Policy and Innovative Financing, HarvestPlus Washington DC,Rewa Misra and Senior Programme Manager-Agriculture, Bill and Millanda Gates Foundation Nigeria,Dr.
Climate change is a major threat to food security and nutrition in Nigeria. Accelerated changes in climate are expected to lead to potentially significant impacts on crop yields, micronutrient content, and food prices and make it more difficult for farmers to produce food. “And in some instances, if it happens, it is irreversible, and we also know that in the first 1,000 days of a child, if the child misses some of these essential micronutrients, it also impairs the development of the child’s brain, and if it happens that way, that child will grow and not be able to compete with his peers. They will grow up and become leaders who cannot take key decisions for our development.
Therefore, the conventional seed companies that convert the seeds into certified seeds link them with the agro-dealers who get the seeds to the farmers in the communities. Misra said: “It is about facilitating policy reforms to really scale up climate-smart agriculture inputs, biofortified inputs, as farmers can have access to nutrition but are also resilient to climate change, and in that context, this is a multi-stakeholder workshop we are bringing, and it is co-hosted with the Federal Ministry of Agriculture and Food Security, and we are bringing together the Federal Ministries of Agriculture, Environment, and Health, representatives of development partners,...