BY AGNES NWORIE, ABAKALIKI
As the world sets apart the month of March every year to celebrate the dignity of womanhood and their contribution to the progress of human race, stakeholders have called on governments at all levels to provide farm incentives for widow farmers to aid food security.
Members of Ngodo community in Afikpo North Local Government Area of Ebonyi State, said that farmers who were widows had been at the forefront of food production in the state and sought for support for them. In an interview with The Point correspondent during a visit to the community, the leader of the Akwahingodo Widowed Farmers Group, Mrs Beatrice Otu, noted that the widows were poised to ensure food sufficiency in the country if assisted by government to go into all seasons’ mechanised farming.
Another widow farmer, Esther Mbe who said the importance of mechanised farming systems could never be over-emphasized, decried difficulties and limitations they faced when working manually on the farm and solicited for incentives from government to change the ugly trend.
The President of Ngodo Progressive Union, Patrick Idam-Isu disclosed that their ancestors allocated over 100 hectares of land in their ancestral home for their widows for farm purposes to cushion the effects of the usual difficulties associated with widowhood. According to Idam-Isu, Akwahingodo Widow Farm is capable of feeding the entire South-Eastern States if well funded by government via incentives like improved crop seedlings, bags of fertilizer, loans, tractors, and irrigation facilities, among others.
“Akwahingodo Widows’ Farm in Afikpo North Local Government Area of Ebonyi State has the capacity of feeding the entire South-Eastern States of Nigeria if given the required boost. We solicit for government incentives to the widows so that they can make optimal use of the vast land. Our forefathers allocated over 50 hectares of land from our ancestral home towards Amasiri junction to them for farming as a way of assisting them to cope with the hardship which widows face after the demise of their husbands.
“The land is always shared to them in compliance with the tenets of shifting cultivation at the beginning of every raining season where they cultivate mostly cassava, cocoyam, water yam vegetables, among other crops.” He explained that the community had applied for the NG-CARES support programme to complete the Civic Center project hitherto started through self help but regretted that the fund had yet to be approved and appealed to the state government to come to their aid.
In a bid to ensure easy transportation of the farm produces to the market, an elderly man in Ngodo community, Chief Innocent Alu Egwu, called on the state government to take over the reconstruction of the Uzo Ngodo road, linking the Akwahi Ngodo farm road with Ibii community and Abakaliki. A member of Ngodo Progresive Union, Okwu Oko Inya reiterated the union’s commitment to embarking on more infrastructural projects to ensure rapid rural development but regretted that the lack of fund was hindering the progress.