Why Nigerians must embrace urban agriculture to ensure food suffiency

Oluwatomi Olatoye, an urban agriculturist, in this interview shares detailed information on how Nigerians can make use of urban agriculture to make food available for themselves and ways by which government and private sector can contribute hugely to the development of agriculture in Nigeria.

By Nurudeen Alimi
Nigerian Tribune
July 16, 2024

Excerpt:

OBE started two years ago in Ondo State. And the concept of OBE is to encourage people to grow everything that they need for soup. We realise that in the African setting, particularly in Nigeria, when there is soup at home, there is food but when there is no soup there is no food. It means that soup is a major thing in the meal of an African family. So, we now came up with the concept that if soup is important to every household, let us teach every household on how to grow all the ingredients that they need to cook soup. What are those ingredients? They are: tomatoes, rodo, shombo, etc. You also need to spice your food and doing this you need efinrin, which is commonly referred to as scent leaf. You need to put meat and other things to make the soup delicious.

So, under OBE, we will teach you all the things that you need to cook that soup. We will teach you how to plant your tomatoes, rodo, shombo and other items. We will also teach you how to plant the spices. You know some of us use artificial seasoning to cook. But we are encouraging people to embrace the use of natural spices. For instance, we are going to introduce people to natural spices that they can use to cook such as curry plant. We will also teach them how to plant ginger and turmeric. You need ginger, garlic and turmeric to cook your food. You also need onions. Before now, we used to think onions cannot grow in the South-West. But for the past three years, people in the South-West have been growing onions. So, part of the things that we teach under OBE is how you can grow your onions.

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