The Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO) has expressed grave concern that Nigeria has the fastest depletion of natural resources in the world.
FAO country Representative to Nigeria, Suffyan Koroma, stated this in Abuja during the opening ceremony of the training workshop on Land cover Change Detection using FAO Free and Open source Geospatial tools, organized by the organisation in collaboration with Nigeria REDD+ Programme.
“There are quite a number of issues: first, Nigeria’s population density and growth rate is very high. Secondly, most of the communities rely on these resources for their survival. So is very easy to find people going to cut down forest for fuel, timber and other sources. Thirdly, there is weak enforcement of forestry regulations and where you don’t have good enforcement, it’s a serious problem,” he said.
Represented by Ahmed Matane, the Assistant FAO Rep in charge of Programme, he further stressed that “We have also seen expansion of agriculture that brings more land into cultivation and that is not usually sustainably done, which infoms the reason why FAO is promoting climate-based or smart agriculture where you bring all of these sustainability issues into agricultural practices so that you can maintain the forest in sustainable manner for the future generation.”
