Minister of Agriculture, Chief Audu Ogbe has said that the best way to avert the worse form of farmers/herdsmen clashes next year is the provision of adequate ranches.
“We have to move the cattle to the good old grazing reserves and we just have to create environment for them, clusters of ranches where they have water, grass and security against rustlers.
“For nearly 40 years we didn’t do much about cattles, we also forgot that cattle contribute 6 percent to GDP. The cheapest way of rearing cattle is by roaming around with them as you see now. If you go into a ranch is not cheap and government cannot subsidized cattle rearing like they do in Europe, where they subsidize every cow with €6 which is about N2,400. We cannot afford that.
“So the thing is, to create those ranches and the herdsmen are prepared to pay tax to support the programme. If we don’t do it, next year will be worse than this year I assure you.”
Audu Ogbe, who spoke to news men today, Monday, at the presidential Villa, Abuja, said that the Food Security Council at its meeting today made some recommendations, that include Afro-rangers.
Governor Samuel Dalong of Plateau State who was at the meeting said: “we noticed that if you are talking about farmers/herdsmen crisis, you have to train a specialized group of security outfit to handle those issues, it is not to concentrate on conventional security.
“So there is a recommendation before Mr. President for the employment and training of Afro-rangers. What we are still appealing to Mr. President is to hasten the process so that it can help solve some of the problems that we have in various states on the conflicts between farmers and herdsmen.
“We extensively discussed about food security in our country. We extensively discussed the price of good in the market, availability of food, the challenges facing us some are emergencies, others are rather long term. We also discussed the credit in agriculture which is a major challenge.
“The cost of borrowing funds on agriculture has been a bit too high in this country and that has been one of the factors impeding the growth of agriculture in the country and one of the factors stopping young people especially and women participating in agriculture and making it.
“Today, we resolved that we must make Agric lending cheap and we are looking at interest rate at the lower end of one digit. We don’t have any figures yet but we are hoping that by the time we meet again we can announce that.
“We also looked at the conflicts between farmers and herdsmen and what steps to take, possibilities of draught, security issues impeding on agriculture growth and the fact that agriculture has to become the mainstay of our economy over and above oil and gas.
“This is basically what we discussed and our recommendation will go to Mr. President and the next time we meet we will give you more details on what we want to achieve.”
Home BUSINESS AGRICULTURE The Way To Avert Worse Farmers/Herders’ Clashes Next Year Is Provision Of...
