Agricultural Education as Catalyst for Activating Programmes, Acts and Policies for Enhancing Food Security in Nigeria

Abstract

A significant proportion of the world’s population is undernourished with about 26.8% of the population in sub-Saharan Africa suffering from chronic malnutrition. The issue of food security has been one of the major concerns of the twenty-first century. The paper adopted the literature review approach to examine the contribution of agricultural education to food security in Nigeria as well as the present and past government efforts at addressing food security. The paper also examines the agricultural policies of past and present governments of Nigeria to address the issue of food insecurity. Some of the policies acts and programmes include National Accelerated Food Production Programme (NAFPP), Agricultural Development Projects (ADP) and National Home-Grown School Feeding Programmes (NHGSFP) among others. The study recommended that government should boost agricultural education through an increase in budgetary allocation, motivation and recruitment of qualified personnel, and change of current status of agricultural science from elective to compulsory while linkage between agricultural education and agricultural policies and programme and acts in Ministry of Agriculture and Natural Resources should be ensured. The study, therefore, concluded that food security can be attained through effective repositioning of agricultural education, to serve as means of sensitizing the youths to government efforts in agriculture thereby catalyzing to boost government agricultural programmes.