By Kehinde Akinkumi, YeyeNews.com, September 9, 2021
To salvage the country from impending famine, Malagasy Prime Minister, Christian Ntsay, has set up a committee led by the Minister of Agriculture, Roland Ravatomanga, to understudy the Green Revolution Programme of 1980. The committee is saddled with the responsibility of achieving the following objectives:
To ensure and stabilize alternative water distribution to farmers across the country
To ensure water-retaining varieties of crops
To become self reliant in rice and other cereals
To introduce heavy farm equipment and their use
In a private Whatsapp chat with YeyeNews.com journalists, Mr. Ntsay said that the nation is confident that the committee would, at the end of the understudy, come up with a world-class insight that would ensure food security for the populace. “The numerical buoyance of Nigeria amazes us. Lagos, our West African sister state is almost equal to our entire population, yet the government has been able to sustain food sufficiency amidst desertification facing the northern side of the country. We don’t want to look too far, since the scientific know-how within our continent implemented a program forty years ago that is still yielding great results today.”
On the other hand, the opposition party has criticized the government’s policy in what it termed “a rash decision of quick fixes”. It ridiculed the administration of setting out to study decades-old program that many historians would agree failed in the first few years of its implementation. “This Government is running things with kid’s glove. I don’t think Nigeria’s 1980 Green Revolution Program is what this country needs now. The agricultural problems Nigeria faced then is quite different from what we are facing now. We are talking about drought. We should leave politics aside and find our way around this catastrophic level of hunger.”
