Lack of sugar factories stalls sugarcane farming in Katsina

The farmers made the lamentation while responding to this reporter’s question at Kankara and Sheme markets in Kankara and Faskari local government areas of the state recently.A sugar cane farmer, Malam Abdullahi Mabai, said: “A local farmer can earn optimum profit from his farming only when processing industries are buying his commodity as raw material, […]

The farmers made the lamentation while responding to this reporter’s question at Kankara and Sheme markets in Kankara and Faskari local government areas of the state recently.
A sugar cane farmer, Malam Abdullahi Mabai, said: “A local farmer can earn optimum profit from his farming only when processing industries are buying his commodity as raw material, but in case of the sugarcane we are farming, it has no industrial value hence it only ends up being consumed locally as snacks.”
He stressed that farmers have no encouragement from government and the private sector to cultivate industrial sugarcane considering that there is no existing sugar processing company in the state which traditionally provided farmers with the industrial sugarcane seedlings and orientation on how to cultivate it.
Sarkin Fili, Sugarcane section of Sheme market, MalamSafiyanu Ibrahim, said about two months ago they attended a seminar under the auspices of Sugarcane Farmers Association in Dutse, Jigawa State, to fashion out ways of improving sugarcane production as well as unraveling the untapped opportunities in its farming.
“The seminar brought us to terms with the ways in which Jigawa farmers are faring in industrial sugarcane farming with the establishment of sugar refining plant in the state by Dangote. The seminar also acquainted us with other untapped opportunities in sugarcane production such as ethanol, a bio-fuel produced by the fermentation of sugarcane juice and its dried stalks,” he said.
He also said arrangements have been made for the Jigawa sugar cane farmers to supply their Katsina counterparts with special seedlings of industrial sugarcane as well as how to explore its market after harvest.
Sugarcane farming, he explained, cuts across all the 11 local government areas of Funtua Senatorial zone with Sabua, Danja, Kafur, Kankara and Faskari as major suppliers to Sheme market.
Similarly, Shika, Giwa and Birnin Gwari local government areas of Kaduna State as well as some parts of Zamfara do supply Sheme market with large quantity of sugarcane.
Local factories that are processing the commodity to produce local brown sugar are now being phased out with modern refined sugar granules.
Another farmer from Zangon Kankara, Kankara LGA, Malam Rabilu Suleiman, decried how the dividends of agricultural policies of both federal and state governments are not reaching the sugar cane farmers.
He alleged that politicians and some association leaders manipulate the processes of fertiliser and pesticides distribution such that the farmers were denied access or at best received them late.
“Sugarcane farming needs fertiliser and pesticide to flourish but whenever it is provided by government, most of it end up in the hands of some association leaders and politicians that sell at exorbitant prices in the open markets,” he said.
Similarly Malam Suleiman Usman Sheme a farmer called on both government and the private sector to consider the potentials of Katsina State with its teeming sugarcane farmers and establish a sugar processing factory in the state.