C’River Rice Farmers Want Anchor Borrowers’ Scheme Rolled over into 2018
Rice farmers in Cross River State are demanding the rollover of the implementation Central Bank of Nigeria’s (CBN), Anchor Borrowers Programme (ABP) in the state from the 2017, to the 2018 rice planting season so that over their members can repay the loans they collected as participants.
The farmers said they were making the call because the implementation of the scheme for rice cultivation in the state was fraught with plenty of problems.
Making the call recently, the farmers decried the inability of the committee set up by the State Governor, Senator Ben Ayade, and headed by the office of his Special Adviser on Revenue, Mr. Godwin Akwaji, to efficiently distribute the farming inputs for rice cultivation to majority of the 5,746 farmers who are participating in the scheme.
At an interaction with the Permanent Secretary, Ministry of Agriculture, Mr. Justin Ugbe, who went round the three senatorial zones of the state at the weekend, the farmers complained that due to obvious lapses in the implementation of the rice growers scheme in the state, they could not meet the expected target on rice production, and repayment of loans facilitated by the anchor borrowers scheme.
Speaking on behalf, rice farmers in the Southern
Senatorial District, Mr. David Esese, told Ugbe that apart from the farmers in Bakassi Local Government Area, who were able to access the financial component of the loan, others in the remaining six local government areas in the senatorial district were not given the agreed money to facilitate the cultivation of rice on their farms as envisaged.
“Majority of us got the rice input, but the fertilizers were distributed haphazardly with some getting the urea and others NPK. Some got the chemicals while others did not get, and nobody was given the financial component of the loan apart from Bakassi farmers,” Esese said.
He said farmers visited the Bank of Agriculture at Obubra several times to get the financial component of the loan, but none was given to them.
Esese said the inability of most of the farmers to get the financial component of the loan frustrated their efforts at cultivating several hectres of swamp rice on their farmlands.
In Ogoja, the representative of the farmers in the Northern Senatorial District, Osborn Kanjal, said the rice distributed to them as inputs failed to germinate in the farms due to the long period the rice was stored before it was distributed for cultivation.
“We were given the rice in September, 2016 and by that time, the rice season had passed and so we kept the rice for the 2017 rice planting season but by the time we planted the rice, it refused to germinate owing to heat that affected it because of the long storage period,” Kanjal said.
He said over 90 per cent of the farmers in the northern senatorial district of the state could not access the financial component of the loan as the Bank of Agriculture in Ogoja said the money was held up in their headquarters in Kaduna.