Minister for Agriculture and Food Security, Aliyu Abdullahi, has said ginger farmers incurred losses amounting to N12 billion due to the disastrous disease epidemic that destroyed their crops in 2023.
This was stated this at the Agricultural Insurance “train the trainer” workshop on Thursday in Abuja
He highlighted the incidents of the 2023 wet farming season, where ginger farmers in Kaduna suffered immensely from the outbreak of the ginger blight disease.
Abdullahi said the farmers lost over 90 per cent of their total harvest for the season. “Only a few of those ginger farmers who took our insurance protection received monetary compensation for their harvest losses.
“These set of farmers could boast of returning to their farms without little or no financial assistance, unlike their uninsured counterparts who had to dip into their meagre savings to be able to continue farming.
“That is some food for thought and something that we all have to bear in mind; as we are at all times one or two bad harvest seasons away from losing our food supplies,” he said.
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Mr Abdullah said that the 2024 flood outlook released by the Ministry of Water Resources and Sanitation has alerted 148 Local Government Areas (LGAs) in 31 states as high flood-risk areas.
He said that the report for the first quarter of the year stated that 249 LGAs in 36 states and the FCT fall within moderate flood-risk areas.
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