By Perpetua Onuegbu

The Nigerian Women for Agricultural Progressive and Development Initiative (NWAPDI) on Thursday urged governments and relevant stakeholders to pay more attention to safety and security of farmers.

The President of NWAPDI, Mrs Omolara Svensson said this in Abuja at the Free Safety Awareness course on Agro Safety Procedures for Nigerian Women for Agricultural Progress.

The theme of the training which was organised in collaboration with Occupational Safety and Health Association Mrs Omolara Svensson said this in Abuja at the Free Safety Awareness course on Agro Safety Procedures for Nigerian Women for Agricultural Progress., UK, is “Identify Hazards Risks in Vegetable Farming in Nigeria“.

Svensson said a lot of  attention was paid to empowerment and provision of farming aids while the safety and security of farmers were neglected.

“It is high time we started paying more attention to training our farmers, food processors everyone in the agriculture sector on the importance of security and safety on our farms and at processing plants.

“We focus a lot on empowerment, giving out subsidies and farm input but there is a lot of gap when it comes to safety at work place.

“I know how much out of pocket I give to farmers because they didn’t have the right sort of farm booths on or they didn’t wear their gloves.

“It’s high time we have to look into the type of training that have to do with security and safety at our place of work”, he said.

She commended OSHAssociation for collaborating with the group to educate the women in agriculture on proper safety measures in their operations.

“In this training we have 150 women. The whole idea is that the zonal and state coordinators would take this training back to their ward coordinators and spread it so that we keep improving our selves’’, she said.

Speaking on the association’s collaboration with All Farmers Association of Nigeria (AFAN) she said they would work with the farmers` body to improve the fortunes of female farmers.

Mr Harrison Ehimikhuai, Chief of Staff to the Nigerian Regional Administrator, OSHAssociation said though hazards and risks are part of every occupation, it was important to have the necessary skills to mitigate them.

“For the agric women we know that there are many hazards which pose threat to their existence and the crop or the produce they are expected to get after the farming season.

“So during this training they are expected to go home with various knowledge on how to control hazards, be it physical, chemical from fertilisers, biological hazards or even psychological,” Ehimikhuai said.

The President, AFAN, Mr Kabiru Ibrahim, commended NWAPDI for the training, saying that safety was important in agriculture.

“People in Europe reject what we produce because they say it is not safe. If women who are very important farmers prepare with that in mind then we will be able to export and earn foreign exchange for Nigeria.

“So it is very important that our women are trained properly so that they can prepare safe agricultural products for Nigeria and also be safe’’, he said.

The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports that NWAPDI at a news conference dissociated itself from AFAN over what it described as poor inclusion of women in AFAN activities.