Management of Drought and Desertification for Sustainable Agricultural Development in Nigeria

Abstract

It is no gain saying today that uncontrolled and uncoordinated roles of man are responsible for geo-environmental degradation in Nigeria, be it intentional or inadvertent. Take for instance, Nigeria which will be the focus of this paper has some conservation legislations currently in force and yet the state has not and may never recover from devastating drought years. Many failed measures have been advanced as efforts to improving the productivity of the needed potential of large expanse of land put under cultivation proved unsuccessful. That is, all the measures ever launched to improve agricultural output are not yielding much needed positive results. This is partly due to poor management during persistent drought spells. However, this paper sets to unravel the drought management skills that could be employed to actualise agricultural sustainability. Basically, literature search of information from articles from Google scholar, libraries, etc. as well as personal survey to federal and state ministry of agriculture were exploited. It may be safe to state, therefore, that designing strategies to control or curb drought should take advantage of archived data for present and future research studies that may help arrest the seemingly physical march of the Sahara Desert into West Africa.