From Joe Effiong, Uyo
Akwa Ibom State government’s claims to have disbursed more than N1.2 billion as interest-free loans to 2,000 cassava farmers in the last two years appear to have had no effect on the supply of garri as the price of the staple food item has reached a record high.
An investigation by Daily Sun revealed that the government’s drive towards food sufficiency is principally hampered by the low capacity utilisation of its multi-faceted cassava processing mills as well as lack of commitment to such agric loan by the beneficiaries.
Though Dr Glory Edet, the state agriculture commissioner said such loans were deliberate moves to reduce the astronomical price of garri, a staple food in the state by boosting the production capacity of cassava farmers, Daily Sun has observed that garri has become so costly resulting in the state government led by Edet to handle the direct sale of the product to civil servants in Uyo.
Edet pointed out that the initiative was not limited to increased cassava production, disclosing that 2,000 maize and vegetable farmers also benefitted from interest-free loans even as her ministry distributed 700,000 cocoa seedlings to cocoa farmers and boosted livestock farmers with improved breeds of goats and other animals.
She explained that the present utilisation of the cassava mills is dependent on the quantity of cassava from its demonstration farms across the state but said that government has, in addition, acted as off checkers by buying from smallholder cassava farmers to increase processing capacity and empower the farmers to sustain production.
The ministry, she said, has sustained the sale of more than 150 bags of 120kg bags of garri daily at a reduced price in different parts of the state to ameliorate the hardship on residents and force the stabilisation of the price of the commodity in the open market.
‘Akwa Ibom is blessed with good soil and in Governor Udom Emmanuel we have a governor known for his passion for agriculture by making it key in his 8-point agenda and he believes that through agriculture we can reduce poverty, feed well and stabilise the economy.
‘One of the staple food in this part of the country is cassava and through it we get other things like garri and fufu and so on. The governor is not only interested in teaching people how to cultivate cassava but in processing it because it will be unfair for us to cultivate and then take it to other parts of the country for processing,’ she said.
Daily Sun, however, gathered that the mills scattered in different parts of the state such as Ikot Obio Odongo in Ibesikpo Asutan and Abak, if fully utilised have the capacity to produce enough for the populace at a reduced price, are only patronised by a few individual farmers and cooperatives who patronise them mills while government’s efforts to mass-produce cassava have largely remained comatose.
For instance, it was gathered that the mills have the capacity to produce more than 350 bags a week but their current weekly production has not been more than 50 bags even as the commodity sometimes are not readily available for consumers to purchase at the state secretariat.
Arit Akpan, one of the civil servants who observed the government-organised sales of garri with derision, exclaimed to Daily Sun: ‘Lack of what to do. How many people will they sell to? Are we (civil servants) the only ones who have a need for garri? Let them go to the villages and sell and see if they would not come back in body bags. This like putting the cart before the horse.’
The State Commissioner for Information and Strategy, Mr Ini Ememobong, had nonetheless said that the sudden increase in the price of garri was not borne out of insufficiency, but ’caused by a decision by the association of garri sellers who did not only unilaterally increase the price of garri, but rationed the product to create a state of scarcity.
‘As a government, we did not fold our arms, we opened our warehouses and sold garri at reduced prices. This intervention has helped to reduce the effect of the price increase on the people, ‘the commissioner explained.