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Lagos Food Festival: Sanwo-Olu Restates Commitment To Make Lagos Destination of Choice

Governor Babajide Sanwo-Olu of Lagos State has restated his commitment to make the State the number one choice for food, culture and tourism.

He stated this at this year’s edition of the Lagos Food Festival held at Muri Okunola Park on Victoria Island, with the theme: “A Taste of Africa”.

Over ten thousand people from within and outside the Country participated in the annual food festival.

Governor Sanwo-Olu who had attended the Food Festival consecutively in the last three years, expressed delight that the event was bigger and better than previous ones, and emphasized that his administration would continue to project Lagos as a global brand.
“This is our culture, our heritage, this is who we are, we are Lagos and we are indeed proud of our heritage, what we are doing with dishes, our cuisines and are ready to go out and tell the world that this is Lagos” he said.

The Governor joined some top African chefs participating in the food festival, including Chef Gbolabo Adebakin and a popular food blogger, “Diary of a kitchen lover” Chef Tolani, to prepare pepper soup to the delight of the large number of people who had turned up for the annual event.

In a remark, the State Commissioner for Agriculture, Miss Abisola Olusanya said plans are ongoing to make the festival a two day affairs, like some similar events in the continent.
There was dance competitions in which people won gifts from the sponsors with Laolu Gbenjo dishing out various melodious and danceable tunes.
Highlight of the Food Festival was the Jollof Rice war cooking competition between chefs from Nigeria, Ghana, Togo and Kenya.

Lagos targets N3bn in 2023, to collaborate with donor agencies to boost productivity

Meanwhile, The Lagos State Ministry of Agriculture says it has generated one point two billion naira as at November this year.

Commission for Agriculture, Ms Abisola Olusanya who made this known in a chat with newsmen at the Food Festival said despite the current strenuous economic circumstances affecting good production, including the war in Europe, the revenue generated this year surpassed the one billion naira generated in 2021 and has remained the highest so far, since the establishment of the Ministry in 1967.

”In 2021, we generated roughly a little over one billion naira; We repeated it even under most strenuous circumstances, meaning if everything is to be so good, we should be crossing over N5 billion in revenues annually.We are hoping in 2023, we should be crossing the threshold of N3 billion. But this year, we are sure of making N1.25 billion, this year is tougher obviously due to election process, there was a glut in the system overall; obviously due to the challenges related to the war between Russia and Ukraine and a lot of instability economy wise and this actually impacted on a lot of our food processors and producers here. Generally, the economy has not been friendly to anybody this year but regardless, the Ministry still did all it could and at least we are hoping to end the year on a N1.2 billion note, It is not a fluke that this Ministry is indeed a billion naira industry, it is actually a billion dollar industry” she said

On plans for the Ministry in the coming year (2023) Ms Olusanya said she and her team intend to generate about three billion naira, while also partnering with donor agencies to further empower farmers and other stakeholders in the agric value chain to boost productivity.

She said “We are churning out students in large numbers in the agricultural sector and supporting them through agricultural value chain enterprise activation programme and we hope to do more, but more importantly, for next year, our target is to collaborate more with our donor agencies and partners, the government cannot carry the burden of training people alone or providing the needed infrastructure, we have reached out to a number of them with our five years road map, they should bring their expertise and fund and collaborate with us”

Ms Olusanya noted that with the State’s food system transformation programme and Food system hubs, Lagos would sustainably curb food inflation in the nearest future.

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