Trained scientists must put aside monetary consideration – DG of CSIR
Dr Abdulahi Baaba Salifu, Director General of Centre for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), has called on trained scientists to put aside monetary consideration and work hard to achieve positive results.
He said that as professionals, they should be able to execute projects satisfactorily, to enable donors to give them more equipment for other projects.
Dr Salifu, who was speaking at the close of a four-day annual review and planning workshop on stable crops for experts from 14 African countries, including Ghana, said: “You must be able to use your old equipment to execute your projects for the donors to believe that, if they support you with other equipment you will be able to perform better”.
The workshop was to enable the experts to take stalk of four competitive projects at the end of a second year of implementation.
The fourth project on maize, cowpea, plantain and post-harvest issues, were competitive schemes, introduced by CORAS, an agricultural development research centre, based in Senegal, and the West and Central African Council for Agriculture Research and Development, in 2010.
The project was being funded by the Department For International Development towards the improvement of agricultural research, technology dissemination and adoption, to increase productivity .
The Director General of CSIR called for the incorporation of marketing options into the project, to ensure that the farmers have easy access to exiting markets, and said: “We must also look at the value addition because if we cannot add value to our crops then they will always clot.”
Dr Salifu said this could be realised : “If we all have a concerted approach to ensure that people are also interested in going into value added business.
“We need to promote large scale agriculture to encourage the use of heavy machinery to increase yield as well as creating opportunity and incentive for people to enter into the agricultural sector”.
He appealed to coordinators project to manage funds for the scheme judiciously so that they could attain the intended target.
Dr. Ernest Asiedu, Programmes Manager of CORAS, asked the researchers to work assiduously so that people could benefit from the project.
Dr. Alpha Y. Kamara, Systems Agronomist, International Institute of Tropical Agriculture, Kano, said the Institute had the mandate to improve food security in Africa and was grateful to CORAS for the collaboration.
He called for training on data collection and processing for project coordinators to ensure proper data collection and analysis.
Source: GNA