In line with the Federal Government move to boost poultry production in the country, the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), Bank of Industry (BoI) and Amo Farms have collaborated to flag off the Anchor Borrowers Program (APB) for poultry farmers in Lagos State.
The flag off of the scheme was held over the weekend at Erikorodo Poultry Estate Farmers Association, Ikorodu with the distribution of 10,000 day old chicks to farmers of the association.
Adebisi Adedeji, head of development finance office at CBN, said the program will help reduce the country’s food import bill and address the issues of food security.
“This is the pilot stage for the Anchor Borrowers Programme in Lagos state. We are kick starting and we believe this time next year we will have thousands of farmers on the scheme. What we want at CBN is to ultimately address the issue of food security and improve food production and generally give people access to credit in the agricultural sector,” Adedeji told journalists on behalf of the project management team comprising the CBN, BoI, and the Lagos state Ministry of Agriculture.
“The scheme cuts across cut across poultry, aquaculture, maize and vegetables in Lagos but we are flagging off here the poultry production,” he said. “We have put a lot of things in place before the commissioning today and I am 100 percent positive that this is going to be a very successful outing and in five weeks we will be here to harvest.”
“This is a program from the CBN and what we do is to provide the financing to buy the inputs such as chicks, vaccines, feeds all through till the birds are ready for the table. Beyond that the anchor is the off-taker who guarantees the off-taking of all the produce at the end of the day at a fixed price,” he added.
Speaking on behalf of Amo Farms, Francis Toromade, group head of policy and strategy of Amo Farm Sieberer Hatchery Limited said: “Amo has been position as the anchor for this program and we would support the farmers in terms of technical assistance and the chicks we are giving out are the best quality day old chicks in the country.”
“So far, we have boarded about 1,219 farmers nationwide and harvested about 3.8 million birds and paid over N4billion to farmers across the nation. This is just an addition to what we have been doing and we are happy that it has materialised. As we have started this way I know the momentum will continue,” Toromade said.
Receiving the day old chicks on behalf of the farmers, Justus Eka, chairman, Erikorodo Poultry Estate Farmers Association said “what is happening here today is in line with the Federal Government agenda to increase food security and reduce importation especially of frozen chicken products and we are happy to have keyed into the project by helping the government to achieve its aim of making meat protein available to Nigerians and to reduce the importation of frozen chicken.”
Josephine Okojie
