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By Nurudeen Alimi
THE Flour Milling Association of Nigeria (FMAN) says it is establishing procurement centers across 13 states to off-take all wheat grain from up to 50,000 farmers in its 2022-2023 programme.
The National Programme Manager, FMAN Wheat Development Project, Dr Aliyu Samaila, made this known during Kebbi wheat farmers green field day in Bunza LGA of the state recently.
He said that their number one role was to provide a market for wheat farmers in the country.
“We cultivated 200 hectares of land for wheat production in 2022, and we have now doubled it to 400 this year in Kebbi.
“We are expanding our procurement as an industry across the wheat producing states through additional aggregation staff and warehouse capacity.
“Specifically, we are establishing procurement centres across 13 Northern States to off-take all wheat grain from up to 50,000 farmers.
“The states are Kano, Kaduna, Jigawa, Kebbi, Sokoto, Bauchi, Adamawa, Gombe, Plateau, Taraba, Zamfara, and Yobe.
“To sustainably expand wheat production in the country, we must increase farmer yields, to make wheat competitive with rice and other dry season crops,’’ Samaila said.
He said that cultivation of 114-hectare demonstration farms across the six northern states to provide training on good agronomic practice was also part of their development plan.
“States includes Adamawa, Borno, Gombe, Plateau, Taraba and Yobe.
“We will expand FMAN’s direct Outgrower programme with input loans to cover 4,300 farmers across 3,900 hectares in seven states – Kano, Jigawa, Sokoto, Kebbi, Kaduna, Bauchi and Zamfara.
“We will also expand seed production with six certified seed companies, including both dry and wet season seed production, to produce sufficient seeds for 10,000 hectares next season, among others,” he said.
Ismaila said IMPAN intervened in purchasing more than 50,000 tons of wheat over the past 5 years and signed MoU to buy any quantity of wheat available at an attractive price based on farmer yields.
“We purchased wheat directly from more than 4,000 farmers at 40 village-level Wheat Farmer Centres in 2022.
“We provided loans of high-yielding seeds, fertilizers and agrichemicals to 400 farmers in 2019 and 700 farmers in 2020 in Kano, Jigawa and Kebbi states.
“We provided mechanised threshing services to over 1,500 farmers in 2022 on a cash-free basis in exchange for grain.
“These are in addition to establishing over 100 hectares of wheat seed varietal testing and seed multiplication sites in Kano, Sokoto, Jigawa and Kaduna over the past 4 years.
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