The Nigerian Meteorological Agency (NIMET) has revealed plans to work with agricultural and water resources agencies to improve farmers’ capacities for food supply.
The NIMET on Thursday said that to achieve this, it had created more offices across the geopolitical zones of the country for better service delivery.
“By this development, the agency hopes to partner the many agricultural and water resources development programmes and interventions that have the major objective of improving the capacities of farmers in the areas of modern practices that range from technological to scientific and economic in order to have improved outputs that will meet the food and nutritional demands of our growing population,” NIMET’s General Manager, Public Relations, Muntari Yusuf, stated.
He said the new offices were also opened to improve the delivery of applied meteorological services to governments, sub-national governments, non-governmental organisations, development partners, research and academic institutions and the citizens in general, and broaden the services of the agency to cover greater areas of the country in more sectors.
Yusuf stated, “Additionally, the development will open up areas of collaboration with the water resources development sector in the operations and management of the many hydraulic and hydrological infrastructure such as dams, barrages and other storage/flood control structures, and large-scale irrigation projects scattered around the country that constitute micro-climates around their riparian environments, and so create climate phenomena, which impact on the socio-economic parameters of such environments, either positively or negatively, that may be of significant interest to NIMet in its efforts to advise the Federal Government and other sub-national governments on weather and climate issues across the country.
“The agency is soliciting for the cooperation and support of federal, states, local governments and other stakeholders in order to realise the Federal Government’s policy on food security and tackle the challenges of climate change that are now staring us in the face.”