A Canada-based Professor and Director, Integrated Food and Bio-processing Programme Department, Bioresources Engineering, McGill University, Montreal Quebec, Canada, Michael Ngadi, has called for urgent action to address the challenges facing stallholder farmers in Nigeria.
Prof. Ngadi made the call at the latest public lecture series of the Michael Okpara University of Agriculture Umudike (MOUAU), Abia State, on the topic: “Mechanising Smallholder Agrifood Systems,” which centered on how smallholder farmers and their farming system can be improved to generate higher food output.
The Don, a specialist in developing advanced emerging technologies for monitoring and controlling agrifood processing systems, posited that the smallholder farmers and processors are central in global food systems particularly in developing and transition countries.
He said due to the fact that the smallholder operators struggle with limited resources, market accessibility and outdated practices that severely limit or hinder their potential, “there is urgent need to transform the agrifood systems to function at a larger scale in the light of other cross-linking and exacerbating pressures of population growth, poverty, climate change, energy and sustainability.
Prof. Ngadi recommended that farming, should be conceived as a business to minimise risk, in addition to standardising the farming ecosystem, supports the smallholder farmers to maximize their output within modern value chain, including restructuring their agricultural food systems.
The institution’s Vice Chancellor, Professor Maduebibisi Ofo Iwe, commended the guest lecturer, describing the lecture as an eye-opener to challenges facing smallholder farming system and the panaceas to addressing them.
According to him, the MOUAU under his watch would subsist its strives towards ensuring that the lecture room theories are put into real practice.
