THE Food and Agricultural Organisation, FAO, of the United Nations, has commended the Cross River State Government for providing the enabling environment for sustainable environmental management in the state.
Mrs Nifesimi Ogunkua, the lead of Work for Climate Change Environment and Biodiversity in Nigeria for FAO stated this at the weekend in Calabar during a five day trading for local government coordinators for cocoa, coffee and palm oil value chain.
“The core agriculture areas of this state closely align with the FAO programming framework PILLAR 4 that addresses sustainable land use management and sustainable natural resource management that cut across land, water and nexus of biodiversity climate change”.
She said the FAO has four projects and programmes currently ongoing in the state such as the global environment facility food system, land use integrated programme that is being implemented in 8 local government areas to support sustainable cocoa, oil palm and coffee management in the state.
“The state agriculture strategic plan, prioritises cocoa, oil palm and coffee. We have a project on the mangrove landscape management funded by the FCDO to support the communities within the coastal landscape to promote alternative livelihood around nature based solutions. All these projects are ongoing as focal point for the country”.
She said she is on a technical mission to supervise and a assess what has been delivered on ground to ensure it align with the work plan of all the projects currently going on to ensure that activities are implemented as stipulated in the project document.
“To ensure that there are concrete impacts on ground, to get feedback from communities as well as interface with government at high level – to get their thoughts and if there have been any challenges and how FAO could quickly send in some mitigation measures to ensure that actions are taken for seamless project and programme implementation”.
Mrs Ogunkua who had earlier interacted with some high level government officials in the state including the Mr Johnson Ebokpo, Commissioner for Agriculture and Irrigation, the and the Deputy Governor, Dr Peter Odey said “We want to acknowledge the enabling environment the Cross River State government is providing to the team on ground, the synergy on what the government is doing, the transparency and openness. In summary the cooperation and work has been seamless and very good, it has been yielding results”.
She stated that because of the cordial relationship she has visited mangrove landscape in Creek Town to interact with the head of community, the women and youth leaders with respect to the restoration of the environment about to commence in the community.
“The community is excited about that and they extend their appreciation for the last stepdown training that was undertaken in nine weeks in the community where women were trained in alternative livelihood skills and how to do a regeneration on mangrove amongst others.
“As part of the activities lined up for the community some livelihood equipment have already been procured such as aquaculture kits that include fish fiber tank, fingerlings and fish feed to ensure sustainable aquaculture production.”
