The federal government is doing everything possible to bring up stimulus that will crash food prices.
The Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development, Mohammed Abubakar, said this in Abuja Monday during a familiarization tour of the Agricultural Research Council of Nigeria.
He said President Muhammadu Buhari was very passionate about agriculture and was committed to seeing that people had “food to eat every single day to eat without struggles on their tables.”
The minister said: “We’re doing everything possible to bring up some kind of stimulus that’ll cause reduction in food prices.
“Naturally, nobody will just sit and watch. We’re doing what we can to see that the agricultural sector is improved and the food that we expect for the teeming population of Nigeria is being produced, the same thing with the livestock.”
He said Buhari had directed that research institutes in the country are well taken care of and that it was his priority to see improved capacity to conduct research so that crops could be improved upon.
He said the government was set to reintroduce the Growth Enhancement Scheme (GES) few years after it was scrapped.
“My own concern is to make sure that the input gets directly to the farmers, not being withheld by middlemen. We’ll do all it takes to make sure that the system that’ll be rolled out gets the input to the grass root farmers,” he said.