Cassava: 'Why Oyo won't deal with individual farmers

The Oyo State Government has said it will not give its agricultural credit loan to individual cassava farmers as they may misuse the funds, the News Agency of Nigeria reports.The Zonal Manager, Oyo State Agricultural Development Programme, Mr. Simeon Adeniyi, told NAN at Eleekara, near Oyo town, on Monday that due to the subsistence level of individual farmers, who were poor, the temptation to misuse the funds was real.He said, "The best thing for now is to deal with groups because for individual farmers, there is no string attached."They will take money from government and run away because of the poor nature of our subsistence farmers, they have very little."He urged cassava farmers in the state, operating under the aegis of the Federal Government Cassava Revitalisation Programme, to pool their resources together and present their initiatives to government for assistance in cash and farm inputs.Adeniyi said any assistance from the Federal Government to the farmers would be channeled through states, which would ensure that the assistance was given to the right groups.To achieve this, he said officials of the Ministry of Agriculture were using OYSADEP officials to determine the real farmers through intensive investigation.He said the Federal Government might be revitilising the cassava initiative after having a rethink of it, noting that the programme itself was not new as it began during the Obasanjo administration."You know during the Obasanjo administration, they urged farmers to go back and produce more cassava, then, there was a glut. The question is, what caused the glut,'" Adeniyi asked.According to him, the glut was caused because the raw cassava could not be exported unprocessed.
Click here to read full news..