FG to support Irish potato farmers

Irish-potatoes

The Federal Government has expressed its determination to support Irish potato farmers toward increasing their productivity and modifying value chain in 2017.

Chief Daniel Okafor, the National President, Potato Farmers Association of Nigeria (POFAN) said on Tuesday in Abuja.

Okafor said that the Irish potato value chain programme would be launched in January 2017.

He said that the Federal Government had already put POFAN into its programme and ready to distribute disease resistance seeds by January to farmers.

Okafor stressed the need for the potato farmers to capture their data, including the size of their crop land, location and the number of the existing farmers.

According to him, government is going to give every state what it deserves to increase potato production.

“It is not going to be business as usual because farmer will be working with Central Bank of Nigeria and Bank of Agriculture.

“All the government is going to do is allocate certain amount of money to Irish potato value chain products, give farm inputs, tractors and create tractor hiring centre in each Local Government.

“Government does not want to manage it but ready to give stakeholders to drive the farmers to form cooperative within themselves to access loans and farm inputs.

“The company we are going to use will control the tractors as a centre.

“ In that centre we will have people in charge of mechanization, all types of input, irrigation pump, disease control and anything that is going to help us the centre will provide.

POFAN president said that whenever farmers need anything like fund and technical services, the centre would provide the support.

“The company that is buying our produce will come and buy at our price, and after buying the centre will collect the money and give us our balance.

“The centre will serve as a link between farmers and the company, so that farmers will not be cheated because we should have a say on our products,’’ Okafor said.