Vice President Professor Yemi Osinbajo has said the production of 50kg bags of fertilizers through the Presidential Fertiliser Initiative has increased to over 60 million bags since its creation in 2016.
Professor Osinbajo disclosed this on Monday at the Feed Nigeria Summit in Abuja.
Represented by the Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development, Dr. Mohammad Abubakar, the Vice President stated that the Federal Government decided to deepen its investments in Nigeria’s agricultural sector through the inauguration of the PFI in 2016.
He said, “In 2016, we launched the Presidential Fertiliser Initiative to increase the production of NPK 20:10:10 fertilizer.
“Total production since the inception of the initiative is now over 60 million 50kg bags, with the number of participating blending plants increasing to 62 from just four.”
Furthermore, the Vice President said the blending centers were established across the country through the Special Agro-industrial Processing Zones.
According to him, it was a partnership between the Federal Government and the African Development Bank Group, Islamic Development Bank, and the International Fund for Agricultural Development.
In his remarks at the event, the Director-General, Feed Nigeria Summit Secretariat, Richard Mbaram, said the programme was organized to galvanize stakeholders in the agricultural sector to chart the way forward for the industry.
Mbaram stated that the stakeholders at the summit would come up with suitable measures to address the challenges of proper food storage to reduce the about 50 percent post-harvest losses being recorded in Nigeria, among other recommendations.
“As a country, we are facing challenges around food security, and Agro Nigeria has an entity that has been convening the feed Nigeria Summit, in fact, they need to have this summit at this time before the year closes to ensure that we bring stakeholders together to discuss the issues that affect food security in Nigeria and take it to another level where we can leverage the headwinds to begin to soar around upturning the downturn that is affecting the world.
“We want to support the country from a strategic manner, so we are not having this event because we want to have it, we have talked with the international partners, British government is with us here, the Commonwealth Development Office, investors from the United Kingdom traveled down here and are engaging stakeholders”, he noted.
Also, the Vice President, Alliance for Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA), Apollos Nwafor said AGRA is part of leading an alliance that will ensure that Africa is not the only hungry continent by 2030.
He said of all the countries that are pushing for food security and ending hunger, it is only Africa that is not on track.
“The reason is that we need to get a few things right, one is technology, what sort of technology and innovation are we going to drive, second is treating food and agriculture as an investment and trying to build a return on that investment by making use that we are creating jobs.