Redressing The Challenge Of Herdsmen/Farmers’ Clashes

 Herdsmen

With the global challenge of climate change and receding water in the north, herdsmen are forced to drive their cattle in search of vegetative lands to feed on. Unfortunately, in the search for feed many farmers have cried out that their farms are being destroyed as the animals feed, and in some cases their crops are stampeded and ultimately destroyed.


While the Fulani believe that the expansion of the grazing reserves will boost livestock population, lessen the difficulty of herding, reduce seasonal migration and enhance the interaction among farmers, pastoralists, and rural dwellers, farmers conmplain that the Fulani herdsmen are a threat to their lives and properties.
These contentions have led to several clashes in various parts of the country which have resulted to loss of lives, food and properties while communities continue to decry the insecurity and threats which they are forced to live in.

The federal government, in an effort to find a solution to the clashes has said that agribusiness in the livestock sector will be improved upon and expanded to include commercial production of grass for feeding cattle. This, the minister said, would bring to an end the roaming of the herdsmen and perennial conflicts between the pastoralists and farmers all over the nation.

“We are taking a radical step beginning now. We are going to grow grass on a very large scale all over this country. I am as rigid as a rock that we are going to grow grass,” the minister of agriculture and rural development, Chief Ogbe, maintained.

He disclosed that some grasses taken from Africa to Brazil and subjected to 16 years of research for use in that country produces 28 per cent crude protein. It will be brought in for use under this programme.
“By April 2016 ending, the first grass supply should be on the way if it has not already arrived,” he said, noting that with the continued existence of “cattle grazing and stock routes conflicts still continue with cases of deaths rising.”

To reverse the untoward trend, he said, “Cattle roaming has to end and we just have to grow grass for this to happen. The largest cattle ranch in the world is in Saudi Arabia, with 153,000 cows, and the country sells milk to other gulf states.”

Meanwhile, the United Nations Development Programme resident representative and resident and humanitarian coordinator, Ms Fatma Samoura, has revealed that the organisation’s cooperation framework will focus on agriculture and solid minerals in which the organisation will support the development of agriculture and curbing herdsmen/farmers’ clashes through dialogues, reduction in the movement of cattle from the North to the central states, among several others.

But following the announcement by the federal government to develop grazing routes in some parts of the country, farmers in Ondo State rose from a meeting on Tuesday to address the perennial conflict between farmers and Fulani herdsmen, concluding that the planned grazing zones and grazing routes would not be feasible in the state. In a communiqué to the media, they said that the planned grazing routes and zones in the state were not practicable as lands were not sufficiently available for such projects.

They also demanded the federal government’s immediate payment of N2 billion compensation to victims of conflicts in the area, saying that “the federal government should encourage and facilitate the option of making feed lots, hays and the establishment of mega ranches in the North,” the communiqué reads in part. The farmers said that the nomadic herdsmen were entitled to a settled life as well. The farmers held that the position had become necessary in view of the peculiarities of Ondo State as well as other South West states that are all largely tree crop zones and in further consideration of the fact that the people were largely farmers.

“We cannot afford to be lukewarm to the havoc being wreaked on our people through wanton destruction of our farms, bush burning, rape, robbery and kidnapping (the recent one being that of a Chinese),” the communiqué read further.