Agric Minister Rallies Research Institutes for Better Collaboration on Postharvest Loss Reduction
The Honourable Minister of States for Agriculture and Food Security, Honourable Aliyu Abdullah Sabi has rallied Nigerian Research Institutes for better collaboration to stem postharvest challenges in Nigeria. This was contained in the keynote address of the Honourable Minister at the 2nd Postharvest Connect Conference and Exhibition jointly held with National Cassava Conference on April 24, 2025 at NAF Conference Centre, Abuja. Honourable Sabi said that the idea of postharvest connect came on board as taking a queue from the seed connect, noting that the two components are key to addressing the issue of postharvest losses in Nigeria.
He recalled that various submissions were made last year during the initial edition of the programme and that crucial measures were applied on all the submissions in which the ministry of Agriculture and Food Security is trying to fly future measures needed to take researchers, policy makers and government to confront the issue of service without overcoming the substantial preservation sources in all crops, as well as the livestock and fisheries. Sabi noted that Nigeria cannot have sustainable food security without confronting the menace of postharvest losses. Participants from previous years were enthusiastic about our determination to face the threat of agricultural produce, and we intended to do this as a routine. Sabi also talked about some of the efforts made since last year for technology advancement of culture in West Africa as he expressed appreciation to the Executive Director of NSPRI for ensuring that we continue to steer the interest of various actors.
Honourable Sabi stressed that the collapsible plastic crates issue has been discussed along with the challenges of using the crates which include the issue of transportation. “I want to assure the general public that what we have started is going to be the revolution in agriculture. Adding that before now, everybody in the postharvest ecosystem is on his own. If your friend is in the other side, maybe you will exchange your friendship and something else. But with this, we have now created a more formal platform that is now recognized and backed by the Federal Ministry of Agriculture and Food Security, and I want to assure you that it can only get better, because beyond that, after every conference, we ask for the report, and we try to say, what can we do to address some of the concerns? And I think the key innovation this year is joining it with a major commodity that is both a food security crop and a cash crop and also an industrial crop, and is also an export crop. So when I was told about the conference, I said well, this is the right thing to be done because in the review we did, this issue of postharvest technologies have been discussed tremendously”.
