Some farmers in Enugu State, on Friday, pleaded with their various lawmakers and public officeholders to come to their aid by supplying them with fertilisers as palliatives following the commencement of this year’s rainy season.
According to them, the degree of hardship that befell them as a result of the removal of the fuel subsidy by the Tinubu administration forced them to embrace farming to ensure food security.
They said adopting fertiliser distribution as constituency projects would ensure bumper harvests.
Osmond Onuh is a farmer from Igboeze North Local Government Area. He said, “I’ve been farming over the years, but I doubled my farming activities last year. It is the only way I could take care of my family. But the high cost of fertilisers is affecting my farming already.
“A bag of fertiliser is around N40,000, depending on the type. I need at least fifteen bags of fertiliser to cover my proposed plantations this year. Definitely, I can’t fund them. I appeal to our state and federal lawmakers to concentrate on fertilisers as palliatives this time around.
“People are hungry, but I believe that by distributing fertilisers to farmers, such donors have succeeded in providing us the hook and not the fish, which is a better empowerment.”
Charles Mbamalu, a farmer at Mgbemene, Enugu, said, “I planted much cassava last farming season. But the harvest is very poor because I couldn’t purchase the required quantity of manure to apply to them.
“The same may still happen this season because fertilisers are still expensive. Rather than giving us noodles and salt, we want fertilisers and other agro-inputs, such as herbicides and high-breed cassava stems. My call is timely because if fertilisers were not applied at the right time, the harvest would still be poor.”
Innocent Eze farms at Agu-Abor in Enugu. He said, “I embarked on poultry farming to make some manure. I stored some quantity, but crops do better if animal manure is mixed with inorganic fertilisers.
“Last year, we ordered fertilisers from Benue State. They were cheaper there. This year, I don’t know how the situation will be. Let our political representatives help us by distributing them as palliatives. No quantity is too small.”
It was learnt that the state government, late last year, distributed fertilisers to farmers selected through cooperative societies.
THE WHISTLER reports that many farmers in the state do not belong to any cooperative societies, hence making their accessibility to such government-funded provisions impossible.
