Old grazing reserves belong
Oyo State Commissioner for Agriculture, Prince Oyewole Oyewumi explains details of the 25-year agriculture roadmap of the outgoing Abiola Ajimobi-led administration, the controversial grazing reserves, dilapidated irrigation facilities and plans to activate and sustain interest of the youth in agricultural businesses with a view to creating jobs and attaining food sufficiency.
Will you explain the agricultural plan in partnership with International Institute of Tropical agriculture (IITA)?
THE current engagement that we have with the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA) falls into two board categories. The first one has to do with the work we are doing alongside with IITA and the Nigerian Institute of Social and Economic Research (NISER), also located here in Ibadan. This tripartite engagement has produced a document that is going to serve as an agricultural roadmap for Oyo State over the next 25 years. What do I mean by a roadmap? It is simply a statement of vision of the government, led by Dr Abiola Ajimobi, for the sector in the state.
Of course this has taken into considera- tion what we call our latent advantages as an agricultural state in Nigeria. As we all know, Oyo State is the largest state in term of total area in the whole of southern Nigeria with over 2.8 million hectares of arable land which also cover the major climatic or ecological conditions of the agricultural sector, starting from the forest region in the south boarding all the savanna located in the north. The implication of this is simply that there is hardly any tropical crop that grows in Nigeria that cannot be grown in Oyo State.
What are the contents of the plan? With it, what do you intend to achieve in 25 years?
The whole idea is focused on the transformation of agriculture in the state from what we call “subsistence farming” which is small-scale farming and not technology driven to a large-scale technology-based commercial agriculture. So, it is the effort in that direction that we are collaborating with these institutions to establish, and it means that we want agriculture to become the foundation, the bedrock of the economy of our state, because that is the area where we believe we have a comparative advantage.
We want to mechanise agriculture. We want to introduce good agricultural practices to our farmers. While we are engaging our smallholder farmers, we are incorporating women and the youths for agricultural production. We are also expanding the scope of agricultural practice to involve large institutions that can now produce agricultural crops that will serve as raw materials to the various industries that we have. So, that is the vision in a nutshell.
The plan should have been inaugurated about eight years. What do you think?
I am sorry to disagree with you because first of all, governance does not end with one government. What we are doing is establishing a vision and I can tell you that it is starting now because a lot of