Women engineers move to boost food production in Cross River

The Association of Professional Women Engineers of Nigeria (APWEN), has moved to boost food production in Cross River by providing inputs for a women farming cluster in the state.

Speaking to the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN), the National President of APWEN, Dr Adebisi Osim, said as an association they looked at the situations in the nation and decided that the best thing to do was to help ensure food security.

Osim said to that, they targeted a women farming cluster who were the ones that worked on the farms to provide food and supported them with inputs.

“The overall aim is to raise agric entrepreneurs even among engineers and to boost food production in the state and nation at large,” she said

On his part, Mr Bassey Emogor, Programme Manager, Cross River Agriculture Development Programme (ADP) commended APWEN for the gesture while noting that agriculture used to be Nigeria’s mainstay until oil was discovered.

Emogor said oil made Nigerians lazy to the point that the nation could no longer feed itself and had to rely on importation and palliatives to survive.

While encouraging the farmers to be strong and dedicated, he said he would help them in ensuring they got necessary inputs and technical support to make them successful farmers.

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Similarly, Mrs Justina Ulafor, Alternate Chairman of the Committee on Food Security and Irrigation Development in APWEN said they went into the programme to change the lives of farmers from subsistence to business.

Ulafor said what they were doing was the first phase and would ensure that the project was expanded in the second phase and start looking towards helping the women to attract grants from partners.

“We will be supplying the women with 50 bundles of hybrid, high yielding cassava stems; 25 kilogrammes of maize seeds; herbicides; fertilisers among others enough for 2 hectares of farmland and from there we will expand in the next phase,” she said.

Also speaking to NAN, Mrs Monica Odi, Coordinator of the Passionate Women Farmers who were the recipients of the inputs expressed gratitude to APWEN, adding that, they had not received such help before.

Odi said they had about 50 hectares of farmland but have only been able to cultivate two hectares because farming was capital intensive and expansion required more money and machinery.

She, however, added that another major challenge they had as a group was transportation to the farm which was far away from town in Akpbuyo Local Government Area and solicited for a bus to help convey the women to and from the farm. (NAN)