Federal and Edo State governments have through the National Animal Identification and Traceable System (NAITS), a scheme under the Federal Ministry of Agriculture, developed a partnership that would check herders/farmers clashes and other vices that have led to killings, kidnapping, destruction of farms and others.
At a stakeholders’ engagement in Benin City, the Edo State capital on animal identification processes and inherent benefits, the commissioner for agriculture and food security, Stephen Idehenre said the Governor Godwin Obaseki’s administration keyed into the scheme because it would boost his MEGA (Making Edo Great Again) agenda and re-launch the state into national reckoning.
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Represented by the permanent secretary in the ministry, Dr Peter Osagie, he said he hoped the scheme will help put an end to incessant clashes, boost productivity and acceptance outside the shores of the country.
Earlier, the group company secretary and legal adviser of Mega Corp Nigeria Limited and Gamla Group, Elonna Ezulu, said the scheme would reform the sector in line with global practices.
He said, “For a long time now, Nigeria has been inundated with a lot of incidents of clashes between both herders and agriculturists and the farmers and also, the issue of stealing of cows, this is mostly because there is no data there is no means of identification.
“People steal other people’s cows, go and sell in the market, they slaughter it and the cases close there. And in the global village we are in today, a lot of issues; borders are no longer a limit to inter relationship between nations. We see a lot of diseases, infections and other things, they move from one jurisdiction into the other.
“So, until we are able to develop this sector and make sure that we have proper data for planning, it’s a difficult thing. So that’s why at the federal level, the company and the Ministry of Agriculture were able to come together to agree on a means of animal enumeration, it is not going to be limited to only cattle, it is meant to cover most animals.”
On checking the clashes, he said with the identification marks on the cows, anyone that strays into farms could easily be detected and knows their routes through which they come.
Earlier, the chief operating officer of Ranch ID which is the NAITS operations management centre, Uchenna Ononye, took the participants on the merits of the scheme and the processes for registering and tagging of the animals.