Bio-factory enhances sugarcane business in Zaria

As a new student in my first year, one thing I noticed about my new environment was the availability of sugarcane everywhere for the students of Government Commercial College (my school) to feast on and when the opportunity came for me to go outside the gates of my school, I was amazed by the large […]

As a new student in my first year, one thing I noticed about my new environment was the availability of sugarcane everywhere for the students of Government Commercial College (my school) to feast on and when the opportunity came for me to go outside the gates of my school, I was amazed by the large number of sugarcane plantation in the community.
Whenever we went out of the school, especially to the market or elsewhere, we returned back with sugar cane sticks gifted to us by numerous farmers and hawkers that abound in the community.
It was only in my second year that I began to notice that despite being surrounded by source of potential wealth, most of these farmers lived in abject poverty due to the fact that their hard earned crop used to go for little, or nothing, as the sugarcanes were bought cheaply.
For many years, the lack of a bio factory meant their produce hasn’t been taken to the next level industrially but it remained local where it was mostly chewed by buyers or manually processed to make jiggery (a form of local sugar).
The federal government, recently, inaugurated Nigeria’s first sugarcane bio-factory in Zaria, Kaduna State, not too far from Makarfi, as part of efforts to achieve national self-sufficiency in the nation’s sugar requirements and the people of Makarfi couldn’t be any happier.
The Minister of Industry, Trade and Investment, Mr. Olusegun Aganga, said that the one-million seedlings per annum capacity bio-factory was the first in the series of bio-factories to be established in the next five years.
“The provision of high grade and quality seedlings of sugarcane is essential for the attainment of the set goals of the National Sugar Master Plan,” he said.
The minister explained that a bio-factory is a facility where disease-free crop seedlings are rapidly micro-propagated under controlled laboratory environment for planting in the fields, adding that the finished products would be processed as granulated sugar.
“This facility is designed to address a critical constraint facing Nigeria’s sugar industry-timely provision of high quality and clean seeds to sugar estates and farmers across Nigeria and also processing of the canes. We expect that in four years, five of this kind of facility would have been established across Nigeria with capacities of between 2 million and 2.5 million seedlings per annum each.”
Some of the sugarcane farmers in Makarfi spoke on the new development with Malam Salihu Shehu, a sugarcane farmer for 35 years, saying that words can’t describe his happiness, considering the empty promises made by the past governments regarding the project.
He said: “At a point, we just gave up and resigned to our fate that our sugarcanes would never really improve our lives because, year after year, every government that came will promise us the bio factory but after that nothing will be heard again. We thank God now that it is on the ground and our produce will be treated and bought respectably.”
Another farmer, Danladi Bako, stated that the economic benefits of the project will be widespread, considering the number of labourers that work on each farm.
“You know that not everybody owns a sugarcane farm in the town, some work as labourers and this will go a long way to enhance how much they get paid. If the farmer knows the price of his produce has gone up, he has to also raise the pay of his workers. So it has bandwagon effect and, hopefully, very soon our community will be greatly uplifted.”