The Department of Agricultural Economics came into being in 1966/67 session when the Faculty of Agriculture, which hitherto ran as a one Department Faculty, broke into five Departments.
Philosophy of the Department of Agricultural Economics
The Philosophy of the Department is to train well-rounded graduates of Agricultural Economics who can occupy several niches and function as job-creators and/or employees. The Department hopes to prepare graduates to meet the challenges of the new Millennium. To this end, the Department has a number of objectives:
1. expose students to the Science and Practice of Agricultural Production and Management of Agricultural Business.
2. train versatile graduates who can meet the challenges of self-employment as Farmers; as employees of Public and Private Institutions/Establishment.
3. produce graduates who are properly equipped to extend the frontiers of knowledge in the discipline of Agricultural Economics, and
4. produce graduates who can respond to the varying challenges of day-to-day existence.
Justification
The state of the Nigerian economy has disenfranchised most of our graduates who find it difficult to be employed. The developments within and outside the country have made our programme less adequate and marketable inadequate and non-marketable. Employers nowadays look for graduates who are knowledgeable in the areas of proposed programme is thereby re-designed to:
>> expose our students to the Science and Practice of Agricultural Production and Management of Agricultural Business.
>> train versatile graduates who can meet the challenges of self-employment as farmers; employees of Public and Private Institutions/establishments, and
>> train graduates who are properly equipped to extend the frontiers of knowledge in the discipline of Agricultural Economics and also be able to respond to the varying challenges of day to day existence, such as Computer Skills in the area of Management information system
Basis of the Suggested Programme
It is noted that in addition to technical relevance, it will be highly helpful to our graduates, if our programme is structured in such a way that they could find relevance in any of the mainstream professions such as marketing, accounting, banking, agribusiness, environmental economics, energy economics and the likes.