100,000 IDPs Will Be Used For Farming Project – Yilwatda

The Minister of Humanitarian Affairs, Disaster Management, and Social Development, Nentawe Yilwatda, has said about 100,000 internally displaced persons (IDPs) would be involved in the federal government’s farming project.

Professor Yilwatda said the farming project is structured to employ the IDPs and, at the same time address food insecurity in the country.

He stated this on Tuesday in an interview with Arise TV. According to him, about 20,000 households in IDP camps would be part of the project.

Yilwatda explained that the farming programme would help to restore the human dignity of the IDPs and build their resilience.

“Let me take the IDPs who are most affected by the economic challenges that we have in this country. Their own is double jeopardy, people who are either displaced by natural disaster, like people who are displaced by flood or by insurgency or by climate change and several other factors that have changed their lifestyle and their human dignity.

“They’ve lost their human dignity in the course of doing that. Now, what are we doing with them? First thing we’re doing is building their resilience. And to build their resilience, we want to get the IDPs productive. So we brought a new policy. We were developing 10,000 hectares of land. We are creating cooperatives by January for the IDPs. So two people will own one hectare,” he said.

The Minister of Humanitarian Affairs further explained that 10,000 hectares of farmland would be cultivated. Two persons would own a hectare.

Yildatwa noted that the government would provide everything needed for farming, adding that upon crop yield, the federal government would buy 70 percent from the IDPs which would be stored in the country’s strategic reserves.

“We talk about 10,000 hectare, we’re talking about 20,000 beneficiaries that will be part of it, households. If you put 5 persons by household, multiplied by 20,000 households benefitting from this program, we’re talking about 100,000 people in the IDPs who will be beneficiaries of this program that the President wants us to do.

“We will provide input for them. We will provide counseling services for them, We will provide everything for them down to harvest.

“Already procurement has been done, everything has been done for this, and we’re on the process of making sure that we start with dry seed farming in January for them.

“We will off-take 70% of the yield and give them the cash component. 30% we will own it as a food component. Then we will now store the food in strategic reserves, and that’s the food we’re going to use to feed all the IDPs,” he stated.