Agricultural experts have cried foul in Bauchi State Government’s zero allocation to the agricultural extension service department of the state ministry of Agriculture in the approved 2023 budget.
WikkiTimes reports that early this year, the state governor Bala Mohammed approved the recruitment of 206 extension agents.
The stakeholders made this known in a communique issued at the end of a review meeting on the 2023 budget performance of the Bauchi State Agricultural Development Programme (BSADP).
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The Stakeholders said the non-sectoral allocation to extension agents denies farmers across the state access to direly needed services offered by the agents at a time when the agricultural sector is bedevilled by climate change.
They said the government needs to support the sector in order to meet the one extension agent to 3000 farmers ratio.
Similarly, the communique noted that smallholder women farmers who are known for the production of over 60 percent of food consumed in the state are facing a series of hard times caused by natural disasters such as flooding, cashless policy and hike in fuel leading to the high cost of market prices of agricultural inputs such fertilizers, low savings, adding that that has hampered the productivity of women farmers in the state.
