…Farmers beg govt to buy up the excess
Rice farmers in Kebbi State have called on government to intervene and save them over the fall in price of paddy occasioned by the large volume of rice produced in the state during this year’s dry rice harvest.
Our correspondent in the state reports that harvests of rice planted during the dry season are still on-going in many parts of the state.
The farmers through the Rice Farmers Association wants government to buy up the excess rice produced and pay farmers at a good price.
They said the volume of rice that have been harvested so far from different farm locations in the state this year was unprecedented in the last three years of rice production under the anchor borrower’s dry season rice farming program.
The All Farmers Association in the state had raised alarm at the commencement of this year’s farming season that over 300,000 farmers in the state could not take part in the dry season rice farming because of funding and their inability to get necessary farm inputs assistance from government.
Despite that, the chairman of the rice farmers association in Kebbi State, Alhaji Muhammad Sahabi Augie, said the rice produced in the state during this year’s harvest was unprecedented when compared with what was produced from 2016 to 2018.
He said “We are very lucky in Kebbi the weather was friendly. This and other factors had helped our farmers to record good yield in rice production. This year’s harvest was unprecedented. The harvest was so high that it forced down the price of paddy at the market. The market is currently flooded with large volumes of bags of paddy. If you see the bags of paddy in the markets you will wonder if they are falling from heaven. Our farmers have never had it this good in their harvest.”
He said government would have to come in to assist the farmers who had invested so much in producing the rice, else they will lose their profits.
“The previous years we sold paddy for N10,000, N12,000 and it even went up to N15,000 at some point. But this year, the same paddy is being sold between N7,000 and N8,000 because of the high harvest and volume of rice that are now available at the markets,” he said.
He added that despite the fall in price of rice, harvesting was still going on in different farm locations in the state.
“As I speak to you now harvesting is still going on in different local government areas of state. If you go to the farms and see rice that are yet to be harvested you will marvel at the bumper harvest that was recorded in Kebbi State this year”
He said when the anchor borrower programme was launched in Kebbi State in 2016, the state recorded over 1.2m metric tons of rice production.
‘’In 2017, we produced about 2m metric tons. I can assure you that with this bumper harvest we will achieve over 3m metric tons of rice this year,” he said.
In Bagudo, Suru, Bunza, Yauri, Shanga and Ngaski, where farmers were said to have harvested their rice almost two months earlier, the farmers said they had never had it so good in the last three years.
One of the farmers, Aminu Ibrahim from Yauri area of the state, told our correspondent that he has never experienced the like of this year’s bumper harvest before. “This year was different for us in Kebbi State. We recorded high harvest in Yauri and from what I heard it was the same story in other communities where rice is grown in the state. You can see that because of the high harvest, price of paddy has reduced. We are happy we recorded bumper harvest but on the other hand we are not happy because we didn’t make much due to reduction in price of paddy. We want government to assist us so that we can regain our profit.”
