Agric Ministry, US Sign MoU On AIM For Climate

As climate change continues to devastate the environment and plunge millions of people across the world into starvation and other hazards, the Federal Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development, and the United States of America, USA, signed a Memorandum of Understanding, MoU, on the Agriculture Innovation Mission, AIM, for Climate.

“The sector by 2030 is expected to achieve potential Greenhouse Gas, GHG, emissions reduction by 74 million tonnes (NDC implementation action plan for the Agriculture Sector) through Climate -Smart Agriculture, CSA, and reforestation measures.”

However, he (Abubakar) asked for US intervention to assist the Nigerian agricultural sector to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the distribution of biofortified drought and flood tolerance seeds, and others.

“Distribution of biofortified drought and flood tolerance seeds to adapt and mitigate effects of climate change.

“Development of Farmers Led Solar Powered Small Scale Irrigation; Improvement of the genetic dairy herd; Upscale of Climate-Smart Agriculture profiling to other States, and Agricultural greenhouse gas estimate and accounting bat national and subnational levels for adequate mitigation planning”, he said.

Earlier, the US Special Envoy on Climate Change, John Kerry, expressed concern over the devastating effects of climate change, Nigeria is also facing the pain of climate change in the agricultural sector and others.

Kerry said there is no country in Africa that is spared but something needs to be done for the impact to be mitigated, which necessitated the founding Agriculture Innovation Mission, AIM, Climate in the US.

He said, “A great deal of harmful impact comes from the climate crisis; drought, so much heat, crops don’t grow, there are challenges to food production all around the world, and unfortunately, nowhere, are the negative impacts of climate crisis can be avoided in Africa, and particularly one of those countries is in Nigeria.

“So I’m really pleased that you are willing to join this initiative in Glasgow and now we are here in Abuja visiting we able to witness you signing this agreement.

“Now what this does? The AIM for Climate is an innovation mission for Climate, it is an Initiative we started in the United States with the United Arab Emirates.

“The United Arab Emirates has been a terrific team member that is very creative, very thoughtful about the things that we can do in order to help farmers and food producers, salespeople, etc, to be able to continue to provide the necessary nutrition and necessary food for people all around the world.

“And importantly, this initiative is teaching people new ways to conduct agriculture.”

According to him, there is a lot of thinking going in there, on how to build adaptation capacity.

“How do we build resilience in crops or in other things, for instance, farmers just a huge storm is coming would allow people to be able to take steps that would be able to mitigate.

“So adequate information flow adequate data. In addition to that, we are actually taking steps now through research development to be able to come up with seeds that can withstand the heat or have the ability to deal with a greater amount of moisture. And so we are going to be doing a certain amount of research”, he said.

Meanwhile, the US envoy disclosed that “In 2023, the United States will host the climate ministerial that is next Spring, and we are going to be proud to invite Nigeria to be there taking part in that meeting.

“And we are very happy to have the leadership of Nigeria at the table in Africa and globally, as AIM for Climate continues to grow and define itself.

“So we think this really exciting work ahead of us. We welcome the partnership of Nigeria in the separate.

“Mr Minister, I know you used to wear the environmental hat. You wear the agriculture hat, this is somewhere where environment, agriculture, and climate all come together and you can take a step that I think will have a great positive impact on Nigeria.”

By Gabriel Ewepu, ABUJA

https://www.vanguardngr.com/2022/09/agric-ministry-us-sign-mou-on-aim-for-climate/