By Bassey Anthony, Uyo

The Akwa Ibom State government has disbursed more than N1.2 billion as interest-free loans to 2,000 cassava farmers in the last two years.

Commissioner for Agriculture, Glory Edet who disclosed this yesterday said the move was aimed at ensuring food sufficiency and curbing the monopoly of market unions in the pricing of foodstuffs in the state.

Edet further explained that the loan scheme would reduce the high price of garri, a staple food in the state.

She pointed out that the initiative was not limited to increased cassava production, disclosing that 1,000 each maize and vegetable farmers also benefitted from interest-free loans.

The Commissioner said the government has 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 utilization of the cassava mills is dependent on the quantity of cassava from its demonstration farms across the state.

“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 eight-point agenda and he believes that through agriculture, we can reduce poverty, feed well and stabilise the economy.

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“One of the staple foods in this part of the country is cassava and through it we get other things such as 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.  “In the area of cultivation, we have been encouraging farmers with interest-free loans.

“Last year, we gave over 2,000 farmers N250,000 for each of the over 5,000 hectares they cultivated. We also gave them free improved varieties of cassava stem and this has boosted production in the state.

“We also established Cassava Processing Mills across the state so we can cultivate and process. We are also selling Garri at subsidised rate to help break the monopoly of the unions because we discovered that the unions were charging traders between N300,000 and N500,000 to be admitted and because of that they increased the price of the commodity they sell in order to recover their money.

“So, we invited the unions from the various markets in the state and stopped them from making it compulsory for people to join their union with that kind of money because if you don’t keep the market open, some people may just have a basin or a bag to sell and you can’t come and tell such people to pay N500, 000.

“We have also told them that they can’t reduce the number of sellers in the market because we found out that they created artificial scarcity because for instance in a market of 1,000 sellers they will tell say 50 to sell on Monday, maybe 150 on Tuesday and so on. So we have stopped that and now sellers are free to go and sell without restriction.

“To break the monopoly too we have harvested the cassava we planted in our demonstration farms. We have also processed them and selling them in three cups for N100 when it was a cup for N100 in the open market and we ensured we take them to major markets around the state like Akpanandem, Itam, the market in Eket, Abak and planning to go to Oron in addition to selling at the State Secretariat three times a week,” she said.