By Editor
Worried by perceived marginalisation of farmers in the South West and prevailing food scarcity in the zone, a farmers’ group under the aegis of South West Commodities Farmers Association, Ekiti State Chapter, has held a high level special stakeholders meeting on Thursday at their ADP Agric Olope office.
Top on the agenda of the farmers meeting was the urgent need to strategize on the April 18 all- inclusive South West farmers conference scheduled to hold in Ibadan, the Oyo State capital.
In his keynote address, the BoT of the Association, Mr Alagbada Adeniran lamented what he described as marginalisation of south west farmers particularly during the immediate past administration.
“We discovered that what is agitating the minds of farmers in the south west zone is marginalisation at the center”
According to him: “The best President that has favoured agriculture is Buhari but of all the trillions he invested into agriculture, little or nothing came to the south west. Now that Buhari has left, another person is now in charge, the onus now lies on us to network with the present government and to galvanize our leaders in the south west for them to be able to access the opportunity that the Federal Government has provided for agriculture sector because in view of the nature of the Nigerian economy today, if we are to sustain the economy, to generate employment opportunities and industrial revolution, we need to strengthen agriculture and we cannot achieve this without the efforts of the government”
Speaking further about the strategies to achieve their objectives, Alagbada said;
“Our leaders in agricultural landscape in the entire south west have now decided to come together and meet our number one citizens (governors) of each and every state in the south west and to confront them with the challenges we are facing that of all the billions of naira injected into agriculture in the last eight years, it appears nothing was allotted to the south west, the bulk of the benefits went to northern region and we feel this is high time we called ourselves together and to call our governors to see the reasons why they should invest in agriculture
“There’s no job anywhere and without agricultural revolution there can not be industrial revolution but no single individual can do it alone without the support and encouragement from our excellencies. It is now compulsory for us to be able to feed ourselves”
The Ekiti State Coordinator of the Farmers association Dr E.T Adebayo in his submission shed more lights on the proposed enlarged meeting of the farmers in Ibadan
His words: “All the six states in the south west have coordinators and BoT representing each of the states. We are under obligation to deliberate on which farm crop or commodity that is peculiar to each state that will do well falling back to the existing map of our forefather and the late sage, Chief Obafemi Awolowo. So in each of the states we have the peculiarities in the crops in terms of comparative advantage which we are going to tap into for food sufficiency in our zones for years to come.
Amongst emineny dignitaries that will grace the mega summit include all south west governors, traditional rulers Aare Chief Afe Babalola, politicians and representatives of each commodity farmers drawn from each state of the south west
