Alhaji Ahmadu Waziri, the Adamawa Commissioner for Agriculture, has said that the state government had introduced a database to document farmers’ statistics and check irregularities.
Waziri disclosed to the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) in Zaria on Thursday.
‘‘We have started creating a useful data base of farmers in the state that can be taken anywhere for any intervention.
‘‘This is as a result of the irregularities that have been perpetrated in some states that have started the CBN Anchor-Borrower-Programme,’’ he said.
According to him, the state government is aware that there are issues in some of the pioneer states that have started the programme.
‘‘Before we embark on implementing it in Adamawa, we went round such pioneer states and drawn a number of conclusions.
‘‘Such include the fact that most of the beneficiaries of the disbursement were not farmers, implying that not enough care was taken to identify the actual farmers,’’ he said.
The commissioner alleged that some funds were allegedly diverted from agricultural production at the expense of genuine farmers.
He advocated additional participation by banks and inputs from supply companies for effective service delivery.
‘‘All of these issues were put together in Adamawa State to ensure that none of the issues are going to be obstacles to what our farmers are doing.
‘‘During the raining season, we registered and validated close to 30,000 farmers to do maize and rice.
‘‘But out of this number, less than 3,000 ended up getting disbursement during the dry season version of the programme.
‘‘However, with farmers’ database in the state, all these problems will be a thing of the past,’’ he said.
Commenting on the contribution of SASAKAWA to agricultural development in the state, Waziri lauded the efforts of the NGO toward agricultural transformation.
He said SASAKAWA had trained tens of thousands of farmers through extension workers in the production of different crops.
‘‘These same farmers that were trained went on to extend the information to other farmers and most of the crops being produced are now in line with new farming techniques.
‘‘Maize is one crop that has improved tremendously in the state.
‘‘Its yield used to be below one tonne per hectare, but now it is on an average of three to four tonnes per hectare,’’ Waziri said.
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