Ondo agro-women farmers
In Ondo State, agro-women farmers, under the aegis of Small-scale Women Farmers Organisation of Nigeria (SWOFON), has appealed to the state government to always make adequate provisions for farm inputs in its annual budgets. They lamented that 83 per cent of them did not receive agricultural inputs in the last four years, saying that no distribution was done at the grass roots level. The State Coordinator of SWOFON, Grace Oyediji, made this appeal during the dissemination of a community scorecard on the agro-women initiative of Ondo State, organised by the Justice, Development and Peace Centre (JDPC), in collaboration with ActionAid Nigeria.
Oyediji maintained that women farmers must go into mechanised farming in Ondo State; in order for smallholder farmers to become higher holder farmers, thus impacting the state of food security in the state. One of the women farmers pleaded with the state government to ensure that smallholder women farmers become part of the design of agro-women initiative, so that they can decide the kind of input and training that would improve their productivity. In his reaction, the state Commissioner for Agriculture, Olayato Aribo, said the government acknowledged the effort of farmers in the state towards ensuring the availability of farm products, adding the government had approved an additional N22 million, to discharge services to farmers.
