Poor Rural Infrastructure Holds Back Food Production by Small Nigerian Farmers
Agriculture is an important part of development and poverty mitigation in low income countries. It depends on infrastructure such as good roads, safe drinking water, adequate power supply, a market network, modern communication services and facilities for processing and storing farm harvests.
But inadequate and unreliable infrastructure services are common in rural communities in Africa. Nigeria is no different. Its rural population faces a range of difficulties that hinder agricultural productivity. They include environmental hazards, technological constraints, rising production costs, inadequate agricultural incentives and lack of sustainable rural development programmes.
Old and new solutions pave way to net-zero emissions farming, studies show
New and emerging technologies could pave the way to net-zero carbon emissions agriculture in the next two decades, according to a study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) last month.
A host of new and emerging agricultural technologies lie on the horizon that could revolutionize how we think about food production, but a separate report published in the journal One Earth suggests that low-tech solutions could be just as effective.
Agriculture and food production account for 34% of global greenhouse gas emissions, making these sectors critical in efforts to address our current overshoot of the climate planetary boundary. They are also having profound impacts on freshwater, biodiversity, and nitrogen and phosphorous nutrient cycling — each of them planetary boundaries that we must balance if we are to keep conditions on Earth habitable for generations to come.
In Kenya, Push-pull Method tries to Debug Organic Farming’s Pest Problem
Munene Njoka, a young farmer from central Kenya, is furious. The reason for his rage is a bundle of decaying maize stacked in a corner of his home.
The maize was attacked by stem borers, a pest that swarms cornfields. The stem borer invasion forced Njoka to remove the affected crop from his farm to prevent the pest from spreading to the rest of his crop.
It didn’t work.
