-IITA conducts 4-Days Cassava Production Training in Bentol
By Moses M. Tokpah,mosesmtokpah@gmail.com
BENTOL, Liberia- is noted for having the right soil for producing cassava and the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA) is embarking on a program to improve production by training farmers involved in this sector.
Through the Smallholder Agriculture Productivity Enhancement and Commercialization (SAPEC) Project, the Ministry of Agriculture with funding from the Global Agriculture and Food Security Program (GAFSP) and the African Development Bank is conducting a 4-day Cassava Production training for over 50 persons in Bentol, Montserrado County.
The workshop, which started on the 21st of October 2019 at the Bentol Administrative Building, is being held under the theme: “Best Practices in Cassava Production.”
Facilitators come from IITA’s headquarters in Nigeria and Liberia.
It is bringing together over 70 participants including Counties Agriculture Coordinators (CAC), SAPEC focal persons, Technicians, farmer-based organizations, cassava farmers, National Cassava Production and Commercialization Union and stakeholders with interest in cassava farming, among others.
The participants are drawn from eight of Liberia’s fifteen Counties including Margibi, Bong, Bomi, Grand Bassa, Montserrado and Sinoe.
The Country Representative of the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture and SAPEC’s Cassava Extension Agronomist, Dr. Michael Edet in an interview with this writer at the start of the training said, the workshop is intended to provide participants with basic knowledge in cassava production and especially weed management.
“This is part of what we are supposed to do in the SAPEC Project, we suppose to empower the farmers, the focal persons, technicians with the knowledge because our duty is advisory and capacity building,” he added.
With this, Dr. Edet disclosed that the workshop is to hand over the participants the tools and the basic thing that they need to know in the cassava production especially weed management on grounds that weed consumes a lot of money and as such farmers run away from cassava farms as the result of the huge cost of the control of weed.
“So we coming here to tell them how to produce cassava for profit and how to control these weeds that farmers are being complaining of, in each of the community we go they always tell us that their problem is how to maintain the cassava farm that’s why they cannot expand their farms so they have a small crop,” Dr. Edet said.
According to him, they are teaching the participants how to control the weeds in order for them to have at least 70% and above interest cassava production.
The IITA expects that at the end of the training participants will know what best practices are in cassava production.
“Everybody knows how to plant cassava, but how not to plant is what they don’t know so we coming tell them what not to do, what you much do and what you don’t have to do to have ultimate output from your farm; at the end the farmers and stakeholders will know how to control weeds,” Dr. Edet concluded.