The United Nation’s Food and Agricultural Organisation, FAO, on Thursday, said it has set aside the total sum of $65 million to help farmers who were displaced by Boko Haram insurgency return to business.
The FAO said farmers are going to be drawn from the three states of Adamawa, Borno and Yobe state.
The FAO’S acting country representative, Nouron Macki, who was in Maiduguri, Borno State, on an official visit, informed journalists at a press briefing that his agency will be helping the farmers in the three states under a special post insurgency program.
The program, according to Mr. Macki, is tagged “Restoring Agricultural Livelihood of IDPs, Returnees and Vulnerable Host Families in the North-East of Nigeria”.
He said so far, the program has empowered more than 200,000 IDPs across the three states. The 200, 000 farmers have been empowered their restart their livestock and fish farming, as well as crop farming.
Among those assisted so far are 48,000 displaced farming households in Borno State who had benefitted from the program during the dry season while about 2,160 benefitted during the raining season.
Mr. Macki said, “So far, about 174,000 had so far benefitted from our dry season intervention while about 146,000 had benefitted during the rainy season in Adamawa, Yobe and Maiduguri,” he said.
“Our implementing partners for this program include the Borno state government, the National Program for Food Security(NPFS), World Food Program (WFP), and FADAMA 111.
“The programme was sponsored by the FOA, Government of Ireland, Government of Belgium and Government of Japan.
“The objective was to empower about 1.8 million farmers across states who lost their means of livelihood. “Eighty per cent of the population rely on farming as their main sources of their livelihood; and some of them have not been able to farm for about three years, while some have lost all their agricultural assets to the strangulating insurgency”, he said.
He added that “the agency will require about $65 million dollars to revolutionize farming in the north-east. “Immediately, we need about $20 million for the rainy season farming to cater for 114,000 farmers who will improve food production in the state.”
