Osun Govt. Liaises With Germany To Foster Modern Agriculture

The Osun state government has led a delegation to Germany in search of new insights on modern agriculture, in order to further realise the dream of making the state, the food basket of Nigeria’s South West region.
The state Governor, Rauf Aregbesola, believes that this would help empower citizens and improve the quality of life in the state.
On Saturday, an Aregbesola-led delegation, including Speaker of the State of Osun House of Assembly, Najeem Saleem, amongst other top government officials, stopped at Lindau, in the district of Anhalt-Bitterfeld, Germany.
They asked series of questions about modern agriculture, hoping for new insights from German farmers like Arnold de Vries whom they visited on his sheep farm.
In the summer of 2016, Arnold de Vries had taken in two interns from Osun state for training.
Although the trip was intended to be educational, it was also an opportunity for the government to thank the farmers who took interns in for the training.
Osun, is an agricultural state and significantly larger than Saxony-Anhalt, but modern agriculture, according to the government, is still a long shot and the governor’s team is ambitious to close the gap.
This is part of the reasons why the project, “Support for Capacity Building in Food Production” was launched in 2012.
The governor however stated that so far, well over 40 Nigerians from the state have benefited from this scheme.
“We have to feed our population somehow, and effective agriculture, as it is done here in Germany, can help us,” he said.
The administration has invested heavily in laying the foundations for modern agriculture in the state, and lies in wait for bountiful harvest.
It can be recalled that the governor recently ordered the planting of 5 million plantain suckers in the state, also as a means of ensuring food security.