Nigerian farmers have decried the scarcity of water currently hampering the cultivation of rice, beans and millet across the Northern states.
In an interview, Mallam Idris Musa Sarkin Noman Abakwa, expressed the fear that many local farmers may experience losses in the current year due to scarcity of water, as a result of irregular rainfall in the past three weeks.
He said that many local farmers were jittery that their crops might dry up prematurely due to scarcity of rain.
Climate change, floods, insecurity and other ecological challenges have affected this year’s harvest, showing clearly that there might be scarcity of other cash crops and food items in the markets, he said.
A two-week survey conducted by a team of volunteer environmental journalists from various media outlets across the 19 northern states, had shown how many local farmers that are farming along the River banks used irrigation to save their crops.
Musa, who noted that his crops had started drying up on the farm, said this signalled impending loss for him.
He pointed out that beans, rice, millet, and sorghum farmers were now in a critical situation as some of them resulted to hiring generators that could pump water from the rivers to their farms for the survival of their crops.
He said that majority of the local farmers across the 19 Northern states of Nigeria still practiced subsistence farming with only a few of them into mechanised farming due to lack of funds and training on the available farming technology.
Dr Piman Hoffman, Director, African Climate Reporters, cited climate change as posing numerous threats to animal farming operations, saying that climate change could disrupt food availability and quality.
(NAN).
