LAGOS- The Founder, Supply Chain Africa, Mr. Adebayo Adeleke, has said that Nigeria’s youths are the key players in the fight against food insecurity in the country.

Adeleke said this on Tuesday in Abuja at a workshop with the theme: “Beyond Agriculture, Creating Change and Solving Problems in Food Insecurity”.

The workshop was organised for students of University of Abuja.

According  him, the fight against food insecurity needs the involvement of everyone, not only the government.

“One of my initiatives is Nigeria’s Food Security Project which brought me to the frontline, because the youths are the ones that will be the evangelists.

“The youth don’t know about it, they don’t have a deeper understanding of what food security is all about.

“It is important for us to bring the fight to the youths, because there is no reason why a country like Nigeria should not be food secured.

“In the past six months, the prices of food were not what they were before, in the presence of huge abundance yet so much scarcity,”  he said.

The agriculture expert noted that agriculture had been abandoned for the old, adding that a research carried out showed that the average age range of farmers in Nigeria was 52 years.

He said that the rural-urban migration going on in the country had made some farmlands desolate, adding that there was a deficit in the area of human capital.

“If youths are not attracted to A

agriculture, farmlands will remain desolate and the average age of a farmer in Nigeria is 52 years, what will become of agriculture in Nigeria in 10 years to 20 years?

“What we are experiencing now in terms of food insecurity has been accelerated with a lot of banditry and terrorism in the country,” he said.

Adeleke noted that youths were not willing to move to the villages to engage in farming, saying that there was a need for them to understand that they are part of the fight against food insecurity.

According to him, farming, however, is not the only way to bridge the food availability gap because there were a lot of opportunities in the agriculture value chain.

Adeleke said that the effort of the organisation was to shine light on the areas affecting food security in Nigeria and to let people with solutions provide same.

He said that food security was a national issue which needed to be tackled by identifying the problem, adding that without identifying the problem the solution could not be proffered.

On his part, the Dean, Faculty of Agriculture, University of Abuja, Prof. Akeem Oyerinde, said that Nigeria has over 93 million hectarage of arable land.

Oyerinde said that if these arable lands could be developed, Nigeria would be able to feed all of West Africa conveniently.

“What we need is to take the trends in agriculture and develop our small-holder farmers to improve their storage, processing and others in order to add value to their production,” he said.

Oyerinde said that agriculture is the major thing in the world today and the only way to end food insecurity is to have secure food production, processing, marketing and storage.