From Okwe Obi, Abuja
Some farmers have pointed out why investment in agriculture by successive administrations have not yielded the desired results.
According to them, the exclusion of women and inclusion of fake farmers largely contributed to the default.
Leader of Nigeria Women for Agricultural Progress and National Women Leader of All Farmers Association of Nigeria (AFAN), Enitan Onitiri, stated this yesterday at the Nigeria Women in Agriculture and Agric Business Convention, in Abuja.
She said government should prioritise the willingness of women to boost food production, by providing incentives for registered farmers.
“It is worthy to state that our agric sector has gone through remarkable policies from huge capital investment, grants by donors through foreign direct investment that runs in to trillions of naira.
“But the stark reality is that Nigerian women in agriculture have suffered and denied access to inputs contrary to what is obtainable in smaller countries like Kenya, Uganda and Ghana.
“Our complains, agony and trauma have been treated with kid gloves by the central association that was supposed to be the umbrella body.”
Also, AFAN South West Coordinator, Omolara Svensson, said the sad tale would end going by the determination of women to champion the course.
Svensson said: “We are not mobilising women in the usual way. We want women who are ready to join the movement because it is a movement.
“Something cannot be a movement when you are pampering and begging people to tag along.
“Every single one of us has a role to play. What we lack is one voice. Being in one voice is part of the reason we are here today.
“From your homes, you all have paid for your transportation and carried yourselves here because you believe in the movement.
“Our reason for being here today, which I will talk about in our objectives, for as long as two decades, I have been in commodity trading.
“Drom commodity trading, I started farming. Every day, I read in the paper that there’s one billion here and another billion there.
“I would go to Fashola, my own local government area, and I would see my farmers, especially the women, because we are the ones doing this job, living in penury.
“They would go to loan sharks to buy two bags of fertiliser, and at the end of the day, they cannot pay the money back.
“They would be left in local lathering, but by the time these men and women leave the place they’ve been locked up, I would have written a speech.
“By the time these farmers leave the local lathering, they have been living in, by the time they leave where they have been locked up, they have not taken their tablets that they are managing with the small money they have to buy food for the next one to two months. They fall sick and die.”