|
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
By Joseph Adahnu, Yola
The American University of Nigeria (AUN) has signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with International Institute for Tropical Agriculture (IITA), Ibadan aimed at lifting 11.5 million Nigerians out of poverty and revitalize 7.5 hectares of farmland.
The President/Vice Chancellor of the AUN, Dr Margee Ensign said the aim of the project is to strengthen the economic resilience of 1900 youths aged between 17 and 25 years through self-employment and market driven vocational and agricultural livelihoods development opportunities
With this, the university had contracted the Adamawa Agricultural Mechanization Agency (AAMA), an agency of the state Ministry of Agriculture to manufacture planters, threshers and related farm machinery to ease the burden of farming for beneficiaries of the project.
She also said “AUN and IITA hope to introduce and deploy threshing and stover crushing machines to be manufactured by AAMA for farmers to thresh grain crops such as rice, maize, soyabean and sorghum thus reducing the burden on youth and women that spend hundreds of hours every harvest season.
IITA Deputy Director General, Ken Dashiel, said the MoU would be accomplished far beyond the project by strengthen power of the two institutions towards doubling amount of food production in Nigeria.
He listed thematic areas to involve cassava production, genetically improved cowpea resistant to climate change, maize production for small and medium small-scale farmers towards changing Agriculture from means of survival to profitable business.
