Senior officials of the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development (MINADER) have begun examining ways and means of effectively mechanising agriculture in the country so as to step up yields both for home consumption and export. Their three-day annual conference, the first for 2012, went underway at the Yaounde Conference Centre yesterday February 14 on the theme, “Promoting Mechanised Agriculture and Seed Production: Stakes and Challenges of the 2012 – 2013 Agricultural Season.”
Speaking during the opener, MINADER boss, Essimi Menye, said the meeting was timely as government had negotiated an irreversible bend towards reviving agriculture to meet the needs of the time. The Head of State, he added, has variously reiterated on mechanised agriculture as a way towards emergence the country hopes to attain by 2035. Orientations have been given to boost investment in the infrastructure and production sectors, agriculture inclusive. “We need to see the impact of agriculture on our economy,” he said. This passes through improving some hard-to-die old habits and the ageing farming population that have at best kept the country’s agriculture at an infant level. “We are striving to provide more seeds and fertilisers for farmers. We are going to increase the maintenance and treatment of cocoa and coffee farms. We need to treat about 25 per cent of these farms. We are also going to work to improve and upgrade the capacity of our nurseries to produce seeds. Our aspirations are to produce 20 million cocoa and coffee seedlings this year so as to increase the sizes of cocoa and coffee farms, Mr Essimi Menye disclosed. The ministry is also bracing up to start training more people on the use of tractors and other agricultural equipment so that the tractors assembled in Ebolowa could be effectively used to hit the target. “We need not only to keep using what we have now but also to enrich and empower ourselves. We need young and educated Cameroonians in the agricultural sector. We will in four workshops train non-agricultural specialists on farming,” the Minister said.
