Jos – Irish potato cultivated in Plateau State has been used in its value chain within and outside Nigeria, its farmers have contributed to the State’s and country’s economy.
Recently, these farmers witnessed losses as a plant disease, potato blight ravages farms, dwindling its yields and plunging the farmers into debt while marketers and consumers are made to pay more for the few available bags.
The situation has been blamed on faulty agro-technology, weak seedlings, lack of knowledge of blight symptoms and innovative methods of control, lack of timely access to quality inputs and high cost of inputs such as fertilizers, herbicides, fungicides, among others as farmers ask the government to take proactive measures to remedy the situation.
The Chairman, Potato Farmers and Marketing Association, Pam Chuwang said, “Our members are badly affected by potato late blight, in some farms no potato was harvested. The potato value chain is not helping us, the process was to involve all stakeholders including the government but as far as my Association is concerned, we have not felt any impacts of the value chain.
“We were asked to bring names of members so that we can have assistance in finance to produce, to market, training and other support but nothing has happened. With this blight issue, we have not heard anything from them. We buy improved seedlings from the open market; we thought the government would come up with an arrangement that farmers will buy at a cheaper rate because buying seedlings in kilos is too much for us
“More worrisome is the cost of fertilizer, fungicide which we buy in the open market. Government agencies like the Plateau Agricultural Development Programme and others can intervene, governments at all levels should assist by providing the inputs at the right time to ease our plights and provide food. This year, we bought a 50kg bag of 20:10:10 fertilizer at the rate of N28,000 to N30,000. This is not within the reach of a common farmer.”
Meanwhile, Thomas Muopshin, the Project Coordinator, African Development Bank supported Potato Value Chain project in the State explained the situation saying, “The project came on board in November, 2017 but became effective in 2018 and has three components which are fixing of 200km of rural roads that would help farmers to move their products to the markets and move agro-inputs to their locations.
“It is also constructing 26 water basin structures like small earth dams for irrigation so that farmers can farm throughout the year. We have also constructed 17 spring captures to help in the irrigation and we have constructed nine community markets which the farmers demanded. We have nine diffuse light stores for the storage of the potatoes which can last for about one month so that they don’t incur losses.
“We have also constructed three processing centres along the value chain so that there will be uptake of the potatoes from farmers to reduce gluts. It is unfortunate that blight is happening now, it happened before and farmers abandoned potato farming to go back to maize.
“We got agro dealers, trained them together with the ADP and National Roots Crops Research Institute, we bought a product that is controlling the potato late blight and it solved the problem and production was improved until this year. The disease happens during periods of high humidity in the rainy season which is around July, August and that has been the pattern except this year where the blight took place earlier and you see these losses.
“In trying to solve the problem, our project has a tissue culture laboratory which has been constructed and is being equipped, this is to produce clean, healthy potato seeds which will help farmers to have quality seeds at affordable cost. The federal government is also building a tissue culture laboratory at the National Root Crops Research Institute in Kuru, USAID has come up with a small modular tissue laboratory.
“Efforts are on to produce biologically modified potato seeds for farmers to curb cases of blight. It will introduce resistant variety into the existing variety, reduce the spray of fungicides because most of the available seeds are infected, old, degenerated and susceptible to attack.
“We are educating farmers to spray their farms two-three weeks after germination. Farmers are not getting the immediate benefit from the project because the support is mostly in infrastructure. By next year, there will be quality seeds at a cheaper rate, because our tissue culture in Mangu has the capacity to produce six-million seeds, once it becomes operational.”
