National Symposium On Agriculture Designed To Unravel Bottlenecks Bedeviling Agricultural Value Chain —Dapo Olorunyomi

The Executive Director of Premium Times Centre for Investigative Journalism (PTCIJ), Mr. Dapo Olorunyomi, has revealed that the National Symposium on Agriculture, organized yesterday in Abuja, at the Shehu Musa Yar’adua Centre, in collaboration with the Nigeria Incentive-Based Risk Sharing System for Agricultural Lending (NIRSAL), was designed to unravel the bottlenecks bedeviling the agricultural value chain.

Dapo stated this while delivering his opening speech in an event that was well attended with the theme; Fixing the Nigerian Agricultural Value Chain. Dapo, who also stated that the nation needs another crop of agriculture journalist that would report agriculture differently, look at the policy framework of the industry, hinted that the symposium formed the basis for its planned boot camp for agriculture journalists that will commence today in Abuja.

“The agricultural symposium is designed to stimulate quality interaction at different levels of the agricultural value chain. It is believed that after the symposium, the local community farmer will have a clear knowledge policy and market incentives to maximizing the gains of the farm. The symposium will assess the effort and impact of NIRSAL in derisking the agricultural sector” he said.

The symposium, whose goal was to produce a compendium of efficient strategies to for transforming the agricultural sector, had its objectives; to highlight the bottlenecks in derisking the agricultural sector, articulate the challenges and opportunities across the agricultural value chain, and to draw a stakeholder road-map of actions to improve the sector.