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toubab1020
12242 Posts |
 Posted - 20 Aug 2013 : 02:00:03
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The pressure is building strongly to get youths involved in farming work,rice production is a staple food and very little is home grown.2016 seems a goal which will be hard to achieve.
Agric, Youth ministers intensify anti-hunger push
Africa » Gambia
Monday, August 19, 2013
The ministers of Agriculture and Youth and Sports, Solomon Owens and Alieu Kebba Jammeh respectively, have reiterated the president’s back-to-the-land call with a view to enabling The Gambia stop importing rice by 2016.
They made the call recently during a joint visit to Sapu where a total of 100 youths have been deployed by their ministries to engage in massive rice production.
The two ministries that are billed to cultivate a 600-hectare rice field at the Jahally-Pacharr area are also targeting to employ 300 youths. The first 100 deployed at Sapu will be working on 20 plots of rice fields while the remaining phases will see the deployment of the other 200 youths.
This undertaking by the two ministries formed part of their continued response to President Jammeh’s call for a total dependence on home grown rice by 2016, to be achieved through an all year-round production that will see the proliferation of rice fields across the country.
It would be recalled that in a recent ‘Dialogue with the People Tour’, President Jammeh, the country’s number one farmer, declared that The Gambia will ban the importation of rice by 2016 as part of the broader vision to enable it achieve food-self-sufficient.
“Let me make this thing clear, by 2016, I am going to ban the importation of rice into the country, because I see no reason why we should be importing rice when our land is very fertile. We have fertile land and we are going to put irrigation systems all over the country. You will buy rice from The Gambia itself but not from outside,” he said in one of the meetings in Foni, West Coast Region.
Following that declaration, the Youth in Agriculture and Fishing Initiative (YAFI) toured the country to reinforce the president’s declaration with a view to make it come true. During their Sapu meeting, the two ministers expressed satisfaction with the commitment demonstrated by the youths.
According to Minister Jammeh, the programme will run for six months, during which period the youths will not only be accommodated in Sapu but will also have all their logistical needs provided for by the Gambia government. He added that as promised by the president, all the produce of the farms will be bought at the harvest and the money given back to the youths.
Minister Jammeh further told the Daily Observer that the two ministries are also making arrangements to ensure that the rice is milled on site immediately after harvest, which will be facilitated by the National Enterprise Development Initiatives (NEDI).
He added: “This will make available clean rice that can then be sold in the market as rice produced in The Gambia. The NEDI will be facilitating that process. In fact, currently there are about 200 tonnes of paddy rice that NEDI intends to buy from the farmers from the CRR area that it will mill and sell. Very soon NEDI will start running shops around the country for this purpose. With initiatives like this, we can be confident that the target set by the president for The Gambia to stop rice importation by 2016 would be met.”
Author: Baboucarr Camara
http://observer.gm/africa/gambia/article/agric-youth-ministers-intensify-anti-hunger-push
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"Simple is good" & I strongly dislike politics. You cannot defend the indefensible.
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