From Okwe Obi, Abuja
ActionAid Nigeria and the Small Scale Women Farmers Organisation (SWOFON), have called on the Federal and State Governments to quickly review the Land Use Act, in order to address the problem of gender discrimination particularly against women.
They further requested that both the Federal and State Governments should set aside start up capitals for smallholder female farmers.
The NGOs also demanded the recruitment of female extension agents by state ministries of agriculture, to fill in the larger gender gap in extension services.
The requests were contained in a communiqué issued at the end of a 2-day meeting on the popularization of the National Gender Policy in Agricultural and signed by the National President of SWOFON, Mary Afan and Food and Agriculture Programme Coordinator, ActionAid Nigeria, Azubike Nwokoye, yesterday in Abuja.
They further recommended that, “Humanitarian and food voucher interventions should be carried out across Nigeria while massive investments should be focus on tackling post-harvest losses, climate change, insecurity and farmers/herders clashes to bring us out of the situation;
“States ministries of agriculture should constitute their State Gender Steering Committee for the implementation of the Gender Policy in the Agricultural sector, in a bid to offer equal assess and gender-sensitive approaches towards food production;
“States should create budget lines to fund the implementation of the National Gender Policy in Agriculture;
“Smallholder women farmers should be included in agriculture budget and police making processes at all levels;
“Gender unit of FMARD should establish new mechanism and indicators for data collection which should be gender sensitive. specifically reflecting the concerns of smallholder women farmers;
“Federal and State governments should specifically design capacity development programmes to improve the capacity to smallholder women farmers on mitigation and adaptation strategies against climate change and, provide access to organic fertilizers organic control pest.”
“Federal and State governments should eliminate all forms of culture or religious based gender biases in agriculture.”