After nine years of intensive trials of the Bacillus thuringiences (Bt) cowpea (beans), Nigeria finally begins the final processes towards the commercialisation of the crop with a public presentation to get input from scientists, farmers, policy makers, civil society organisations, experts, faith-based organisations and the media.
The public presentation by …
The Director General of National Biosafety Management Agency, Dr Rufus Ebegba, has said that Nigeria has been mandated to lead the West African sub-region on biosafety.
Dr Ebegba, who said this while presenting the agency’s score card to the public in Abuja, said it was gratifying that the agency under President …
The Savanna Agricultural Research Institute of the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (SARI-CSIR) at Nyankpala in the Northern Region has introduced a new technology to boost yam production in the country.
The seed yam technology, known as Aeroponics System (AS), is to address the inadequate seed yam production for …
From the peanut basin of Senegal to the Seno plains of Mali, to Yatenga, formerly the most degraded region of Burkina Faso, and as far south as Malawi: gaos are thriving in Africa. And over the past three decades, the landscape of southern Niger has been transformed by more than …
“Cowpea is a food and animal feed crop grown in the semi-arid tropics particularly the savannahs of West Africa but also other parts of Africa, Asia and the Americas. It originated in Southern Africa and the cultivated form was domesticated in West Africa.
“While it is a very important crop in …
A new pest—southern armyworm, Spodoptera eridania (Stoll)—has been discovered in West and Central Africa!
This introduced second armyworm species from the Americas was first found in cassava fields in south-eastern Nigeria in December 2016, reported Dr Georg Goergen, Entomologist/Biocontrol Specialist and Head of IITA’s Biodiversity Center in Bénin. Its presence was …
For people who love sweets, 2018 started on a sour note: Headlines claimed that cacao, the tropical tree whose beans contain the raw ingredients for chocolate, was on the brink of extinction as a result of climate change.
As with many sensational stories, this one turned out to be inaccurate. Cacao …
Human diet depends mainly on crops and a large number of species have been independently domesticated from wild relatives across the globe. In terms of quantity of the production however, a small number of crops currently dominate the world share, such as maize, wheat and rice. Accordingly the research efforts …
In recent years investors have started discovering the potential of agriculture more and more. Especially Africa is interesting to these investors. That’s partly due to the enormous amount of agricultural land available, according to the FAO sub-saharan Africa has 90 million hectares of arable land available. Only 25 percent of …
Cocoa, according to the Cocoa Research Institute of Nigeria (CRIN), was introduced by the Portuguese into the Gulf of Guinea from where it got to Nigeria around the last quarter of the 19th Century. The introduced variety was the Amelonado.
This variety later became unique to West Africa, hence the name …