Oyo State is set to partner with the Consultative Group for International Agricultural Research (CGIAR), the world’s largest publicly-funded agrifood research network, which has the International Institute for Tropical Agriculture (IITA) as one of its research centres, on advancing the cassava and cocoa value chain.
Sandra Milach, Chief Scientist of the CGIAR and the Deputy Director-General of the IITA, Bernard Vanlauwe, stated this on Friday, shortly after a meeting with the Governor, ‘Seyi Makinde of Oyo State noting that the state has great potential in agriculture and that having invested in processing and value addition, it will benefit from the partnership, which is aimed at developing plans on how to advance cassava and cocoa value chains.
Speaking with newsmen shortly after the meeting, which had in attendance, Debo Akande the Director-General of the Oyo State Agribusiness Development Agency (OYSADA) and Bayo Lawal the Senior Executive Assistant on General Duties, Milach noted that the partnership would enable Oyo State, as one of the major producers of cassava and a state with potential in cocoa production, to understand what is important as well as the bottlenecks of the value chains the state is working on and how it can be assisted to find solutions.
