by iKml1 | Jun 26, 2024
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
Introduction
Scientific evidences are conclusive that the earth is warming and climates are changing with serious and potentially damaging consequences. Climate change is aggravating the environmental issues such as deforestation and land degradation, freshwater shortage, food security and air and water pollution. Projected increases in extreme climatic events as well as more changes in the weather patterns may further threaten the means of livelihoods in the face of inaction.
In Nigeria, the agriculture and food security, water resources, public health, and settlements sectors are particularly vulnerable to climate change. Most vulnerable regions are coastal regions and erosion and desertification-prone areas in the southeastern and northern parts of the country respectively. While everyone is vulnerable, the most vulnerable groups are farmers, fisherfolks, the elderly, women, children and poor people living in urban areas.
Responding to climate change falls into two broad classes of action, mitigation and adaptation. Mitigation refers to measures that may either reduce the increase in greenhouse emissions (abatement) or increase terrestrial storage of carbon (sequestration). Adaptation refers to all the responses that may be used to reduce vulnerability.1
Nigeria has taken the challenge of climate change seriously. The First National Communication was produced in November, 2003. A stakeholders’ initiation workshop on the Second National Communication (SNC) took place in December 2009, and is being finalized and a National Adaptation Strategy and Action Plan (NASPA) has been concluded. Nigeria now has a Climate Change Department (CCD) in the Federal Ministry of Environment in Abuja, Nigeria. The CCD is created to implement the Climate Convention and protocol activities. It also coordinates the activities of the Inter-ministerial Committee on Climate Change.
Nigeria already has several policies and strategic initiatives which if properly implemented, can serve as adaptive as well as mitigative climate change measures. Many of the initiatives in these policies (e.g. oases rehabilitation in the National Action to Combat Desertification and the National Policy on Drought and Desertification) can be taken as anticipatory adaptation measures and plans, which can be fine-tuned into policy options for climate change response in the country. This comprehensive policy and response strategy will enable these policies to translate into meaningful inter-sectoral activities for sustainable environmental management.
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by iKml1 | Jun 24, 2024
EMPOWERING THE NATIONAL QUALITY COUNCIL TO BUILD TRUST FOR NIGERIA’S TRADE
BACKGROUND
Safety standards are a critical component of agricultural products exports. To this degree, they serve as either barriers or catalysts for domestic and international trade in produce. For Nigeria, safety standards have been more of a barrier than a catalyst. Without a robust infrastructure, countries and territories are crowded out of the opportunities provided by globalisation and trade policies like Africa Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA).
In 2015, the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) banned Nigeria’s dried Beans export as it contained between 0.3mg per kg and 4.6mg per kg of Dichlorvos pesticide. To put this in context, the 1 maximum acceptable residue limit is 0.01mg per kg. This has come at significant cost to the country, as it is reported to lose $362.5m annually in export income from the ban. According to an official of the Nigerian Investment Promotion Commission (NIPC), 30 percent of Nigerian exports were rejected due to poor branding, labelling and packaging. This shows the weight of the challenge of maintaining a healthy trust for trade through a robust national quality policy.
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by iKml1 | Jun 6, 2024
INTRODUCTION
Before the decade of the 1960s, the dominant role of agriculture in Nigeria’s economy was taken for granted. With very little support from government, Nigerian
agriculture was able to grow at a sufficient rate to provide adequate food for an increasing population, raw materials for a budding industrial sector, increasing public revenue and foreign exchange for government and employment opportunities for an expanding labour force. The little support provided by government for agricultural development was concentrated on export crops like cocoa, groundnut, palm produce, rubber and cotton as self-sufficiency in food production seemed not to pose any problem worthy of public attention.
Indications of problems in the Nigerian agriculture, however, started to emerge as from the first decade of the country’s independence (1960 – 69). These indications were clearly evident from increasing food supply short-falls, rising food prices and declining foreign exchange earnings from agricultural exports. However, not much rational concern was shown because the problems were thought to be the temporary effects of a series of crises which eventually culminated in the civil war (1967 – 70).
The second decade of Nigeria’s independence (1970 – 79) witnessed a rapid deterioration in the country’s agricultural situation. Not only were there widening food supply-demand gaps and rising food import bills, there were also rapid declines in government revenue from agriculture, in foreign exchange earnings from agricultural exports and in the labour force required in agriculture. The situation was further compounded by the residual effects of the civil war, severe droughts in some parts of the country, government fiscal and monetary policies and above all, an “oil boom” which created serious distortions in the economy and accelerated the rate of migration of labour from agriculture.
In an effort to tackle these serious problems, government initiated a number of agricultural policies, programmes and projects, largely within the framework of three successive rational development plans from 1970 to 1974, from 1975 to 1980 and from 1981 to 1985. Experience from these policies, programmes and projects have however, convinced the government and all those concerned with agricultural development efforts in Nigeria that there is no alternative to well-designed and articulate agricultural policies as instruments for promoting agricultural growth and development in Nigeria.
It is therefore, in realization of this fact that the government has adopted a comprehensive package of policy instruments to further develop and improve the5 performance of the country’s agricultural sector. These policy instruments are expected to remain valid for about fifteen years that is up to year 2000 A.D.
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by iKml1 | Jun 6, 2024
INTRODUCTION
Nigeria, like many parts of the world, is experiencing climate change. In particular, the country is becoming warmer. Various studies show that annual and seasonal timescales indicate a significant positive increase in temperatures in Nigeria. They show that mean temperatures have been consistently increasing throughout the country in the last five decades and have been rising significantly since the 1980s, with a change of 1.01°C (0.52 to 1.5°C) in the linear warming for the period 1951 – 2005. The linear warming for the same period for 30-year averages on a decadal slice further revealed positive changes in temperature by an average of 0.2°C/decade.
The mean annual variability and trend of rainfall over Nigeria in the last few decades depict the existence of a number of inter-annual fluctuations that have been responsible for dry and wet years or extreme climate events such as droughts and floods in many parts of the country and at different times.
The year More worrisome is the increasing knowledge that the country will be subject to consistent changes in rainfall and temperature conditions, particularly towards the end of the century. Recent analysis of anticipated future climatic trends for the country, as captured in the Third National Communication, indicates that for 2050 and 2070, the minimum temperature increase could range from 1.48°C to 1.78°C and the maximum temperature increase of about +3.08°C to +3.48°C compared to the baseline of 1990. A general increase in the number of days of rain and days with extreme rainfall events that may generate floods are projected over most ecological zones of the country except in the northeast Sahel zone, where the scenario analysis suggests fewer extreme events related to rainfall and flooding.
Climate change is a complex environmental problem because of its long-term uncertain time- frame, scales of occurrence, differential impacts and vulnerabilities, as well as equity and justice within the global power asymmetries. For instance, the impacts of climate change are already driving people back into poverty and undermining growth. Beyond recognizing the potential devastating effects of climate change on the socio-economic and environmental development of the country and implications for the well-being of the populace, the Government of Nigeria intends to strengthen its management of climate-related development challenges through an appropriate policy and institutional arrangements that will not only mainstream climate change into its development priorities, but also encourage the implementation of mitigation and adaptation actions at all levels of governance for climate compatible sustainable development.
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