By Innocent James
The Deputy Director for Agriculture Forest and Environment in Yei River County of Central Equatoria State, Dudu Emelia Kenyi appealed to all the communities living in and around Yei to continue cultivating hard to fight hunger.
She said as the second cultivation season looms people should cultivate to kick off hunger in the society where prices of goods keeps on increasing daily making people stranded especially farmers who are not having food in stores.
“Am urging everyone this year of course we are approaching the second season and I urge everyone to have farming as an activity and those ones who are lazy and cannot make farming as an activity let them remove laziness away, let them continue with farming activities and I think if everyone takes farming as an activity I think we can kick off the looming hunger in Yei generally,” Emelia urged farmers.
She however said too much downpour is making it difficult for farmers to cultivate tear-jerking vegetables and other crops
“Too much rain is not making farmers to cultivate enough this month because most of this time the rain is disturbing daily even in the due cost of weeding the farmers face allot of challenges making things hard for them to cultivate” she cited.
“With the constant rainfalls some of the perishable goods are getting bad because of too much rain this month especially tomatoes, cabbages and onions just because of constant rain and I also noticed that the prices of goods have gone very high in the market making others to eat once in a day” she added.
Emelia said the heavy rainfalls destroying perishable farm produces is making it difficult for farmers to cultivate and the other major challenge farmer face is extension services that can guide them in pest control.
“I also noticed that most of the people living in town face difficulties in reaching some of the rural areas for cultivation including Non-governmental organizations facing difficulties in accessing some of the areas in villages,” she pointed
Bamuze Michael Wani one of the farmers complained of high increase of food commodity prices in the market making life difficult and he raised concern on shortage of farming tools for cultivation.
“What I have seen in Yei people are living their goats and cattle to move freely without control of the owners causing conflicts among farmers and pastoralists in the community and when they open a case concerning stray animals they are not considered instead they first consider the owner of the animal as the rightful person and as I reached the markets the prices of commodities increase highly everywhere which have really affected the farmers and the people living around Yei because goods in the market have increased very highly in the market where you find the price of 10kgs of Maize ranging from 6,000 south Sudanese pounds and when you ask the price of cassava flour is ranging at 4,000 south Sudanese pounds including sorghum that means if someone doesn’t have money that means death because the whole market is spoiled,” he explained.
Bamuze appealed to the government to pay public servants in time in order for them to accesses food in the market for the children who are still learning and make it simple for others to pay school fees for the young ones he stated.