A group of youth farmers in Kwara state has asked the Kwara state government to help provide 10 hectares of farmland in each of the 193 wards in the state to encourage food security and sufficiency.
The group, Goodwill Move for Kwara Youth in Agriculture (GMKYA), said that the government’s funding and support in that regard would turn the state a food basket and industrial hub in the production of food and cash crops.
Speaking with journalists in Ilorin, the coordinator of the group, Professor Samuel Ibiyemi, and other members of the group, said that the project aimed to make some of the youth engage in entrepreneurship in agro-processing with support of the Chinese investment and technology transfer.
The group, GMKYA is a youth wing of the Moringa Development Association of Nigeria, Ranch and Livestock Cooperative Society as well as Cultural and Societal Value Development Initiative.
Professor Ibiyemi said, “We are also looking up into the government, to finance the preparation of 10 hectares of land per ward in the state, where we will have five hectares for Moringa and five hectares for food crops. By this, Kwara state will have enough food and food scarcity we are all experiencing will be over.
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“We also thought it wise to promote the planting and use of Moringa for both food and cash crop and to give the necessary encouragement for youths to go into farming. By the time they are engaged in farming, from processing and marketing and exporting, there will be no youth available for insecurity. This is the relationship between original Moringa Development Association of Nigeria and youths movement.
Also speaking, the secretary of the GMKYA, Pastor Emmanuel Adekoya, encouraged citizens to support agriculture in order to restore better lives in communities and Nigeria as a whole.
“We are of the view that the government should promote youths in agriculture by financing land preparation that will be done by the River Basin Development Authority, which is the cheapest organization for land preparation and water to help us in developing this kind of farming. The government should should show more interest by making fund available”, he said.
The group said that the funding, when provided, would be used to recruit and engage unskilled farm workers to assist the youth as well as vigilance men to provide security on the farm.
Professor Ibiyemi, who appreciated the state government for provision of farm inputs to the group in recent time, pledged to partner with Governor Abdulrahman Abdulrazaq led administration to make his tenure as chairman, Nigeria Governors’ Forum worthy and emulatable.
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