Competitive African Rice Initiative (CARI) has trained extension officers from Kogi and Niger states to help rice farmers improve their productivity.
CARI is a programme commissioned by Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and BMZ (Government of Germany) which is managed by a consortium of partners led by GIZ (German Development Corporation) to improve the livelihood of 120,000 farmers who earn less than $2 a day in four African countries.
Speaking during the training yesterday at Idah, in Idah Local Government Area of Kogi State, CARI Operational Manager, Solomon Enebi Agamah, said the initiative’s objective was to improve the livelihood of over 50,000 small farmers in Nigeria and make them competitive in terms of productivity, product quality and pricing compared to farmers from other climes.
He said the reason for the training was to equip selected extension officers from Kogi and Niger states with knowledge about business so that they can also train other farmers on business skills because they have realised that there is need for farmers to have a change of mind set and start seeing farming as a business.
“The foundation of farming is good knowledge of both agriculture and business. What we have discovered is that even the bank, once they realise that a farmer is properly trained, it becomes easier to support him hence the emphasis on capacity building on business and agricultural practices. We would train them on business and good agricultural practice,” he said
Agamah also said that it is only a fully trained farmer that can be said to have the capacity to transform from a peasant to a business person because he is technically competent about good knowledge of agricultural practices.
“CARI targets 5,000 farmers in Kogi and another 5,000 in Niger State, while in all about 50,000 farmers would benefit from the training across the country. Apart from this, we also have series of other training for farmers. When we train farmers, we link them to inputs and finance to better their lot,” he said.
Also speaking, the state Commissioner of Agriculture, Zaccheus Oluwagbotemi Atte, said the training would address the problem of farmers not seeing agriculture as a business.
He called on the participants to take the training serious so as to impart the knowledge gained to other farmers to improve their productivity, saying that the state government is in the process of giving credit facilities to farmers in the state.
He said the programme has come at a time when the state government has keyed into the agriculture transformation agenda, adding that the whole process of the transformation was getting farmers to engage in agriculture as a business.
One of the participants, Jimoh Zakari, commended the organiser of the programme, saying the knowledge gained would be of immense benefit to the farmers in their effort to improve productivity.
