Cross River State Project Grow Initiative in partnership with AFOS Foundation has outlined plans to train and empower 100,000 agribusinesses of up to 40 percent youths and women across the 18 local government areas of the state.
The state Project Director, Dennis Ikpali, on Tuesday, disclosed this in an interview with newsmen in Calabar.
He added that ‘Project Grow’ is a public-private partnership project, facilitated by Cross River State to train 5,000 farmers in each of the 18 councils of the state every quarter for the next four years on Good Agricultural Practices.
He revealed that if they politicise food production as a state, they would not be able to politicise hunger when it comes with all its attendant problems.
He said, “The whole idea of the project was to increase and commercialise food production. The state’s population was growing and subsistence farming could no longer solve the challenge of hunger.
“To deliver our vision, we started 54 training centres across the 18 local councils to train farmers on GAP, financial literacy, record keeping, as well as cooperative management; this is to enable them to synergise and aggregate their efforts to achieve more.
“The training is for three weeks, each batch of farmers is trained for four days and certified at the end of the training and the next batch begins; our overall target for this quarter is to train 5,000 farmers and link them to the banks for funding opportunities.”
He added that there is the need to produce “commercially through viable value chains that will create liquidity, which will enable us to overcome hunger, build food resilience and grow our economy.”
On his part, the Project Coordinator for the Small Holder Farmers’ Programme from AFOS Foundation, Olatunji Moses, said the training focuses on small holder farmers in the maize and cassava value chain.
Moses, who was impressed with the enthusiasm and response of the farmers, noted that the training was to equip them with the skills to enhance productivity and yield, especially income generation and profitability.
Journalists visited four of the training centres in Calabar Municipality and Calabar South local government areas and spoke to Mrs Marian Kusi, one of the beneficiaries of the training, who said although, she had been a farmer for years, but had been making many mistakes.
Kusi said, “I grow cassava, maize, water leaf and pumpkin, but with what I have learnt in this program, it is clear that I have been making mistakes in the past in fertilizer usage, but with the training, I will do exploits in my farm.
“I hope this training will also get to many of the farmers deep in the hinterlands where they lack access to proper information that can help them increase yield and come together as a cooperative to access aid.”
