he President Muhammadu Buhari has ordered the National Agricultural Land Development Authority to recover all abandoned agricultural lands belonging to the Federal Government.

The Executive Secretary, NALDA, Paul Ikonne, stated that the directive by the President was to ensure that the lands were reactivated and put to use in order to boost food security across the country.

Ikonne, who spoke during an interview in Abuja, also stated that his agency had entered into partnership with the National Youth Service Corps to grow Nigeria’s food production through the establishment of a rice farm on 52 hectares of land.

Speaking on the directive of the President, he said, “NALDA has lands abandoned in virtually all the senatorial zones in the past. They are still there. For some of them, encroachments have taken place.

“But the President gave a directive that we should recover all of them. We went to Bauchi and the community where our land is located came out with the document dated back to 1995, donating the land to NALDA.

“And the land is still there and that was where we did the dry season farming on rice there. So, the Federal Government through NALDA has lands across the country that are abandoned and which is what we are trying to reactivate.”

On how far the agency had gone in recovering the abandoned lands as directed by the President, Ikonne said NALDA had been engaging state governments and had identified and recovered some of the properties.