Delta Clarified How Maize Palliative Was Shared

By Onomiguren Agbamu

Delta state palliative committee has said the maize palliative received from the Federal Government was not sold, but was distributed to farmers across the state in the form of grouping by association.

Giving the clarification in Asaba the vice chairman of the committee and special adviser to the state Governor on transportation, Barr. Jaro Egbo said the Palliative committee adopted grouping method for the ease of distribution and conveying the items to locations.

He said the state Governor had directed that the maize palliative should be given to only small farmers across the state and not to big farmers who can afford it.

He disclosed that some maize palliative are not healthy for human consumption that state government, in his wisdom, decided to distribute them to farmers as feeds.

He said the reason the committee adopted the grouping methods was to enable them to categorize the farmers according to species, that is; poultry farmers, piggery farmers and fish farmers associations within the state.

He further noted that if not grouped in category, it would be difficult for the committee to deal directly with an individual.

He maintained that the grouping was to merge the farmers into an association to enable the state government to verify the authenticity of each farmer through physical verification with their IDs during allocation.

He said the only challenge the committee had was few farmers who do not belong to any association .

In his statement, “the only protest we have is that some people said they don’t belong to this association, but we make sure that we follow due process. Some of them are not registered in association, hereby making it difficult to be profiled”.

Barr. Egbo revealed that those that belong to poultry farming have received while on Monday 12 of February 2024, the remaining two categories, the fish farmers and pig farmers will be verified to carry theirs.

He advised farmers to be organized that the committee adopted the approach of profiling the farmers based on the association for ease of distribution across and also on the issue of transporting the items to the individual location.