BEWARE: ‘Area boys now target farms, cassava processing factories’

By Seye Adeniyi - Updated: Tuesday 12-05-2009


Mr. Gabriel AdejareNOW that it is evident that miscreants commonly referred to as the area boys, cannot freely carry out their nefarious activities of extorting money from members of the public as they used to do in the past. The area boys have now shifted their attention to rural farmers.

The miscreants have also perfected their strategies and one of their new methods and targets of getting money is to invade farms.

Farms or farmers you may say? Yes, recent happenings in some farms in Oyo State are enough to give farmers sleepless nights and those that are actually sleeping are doing so with one eye open.

Going by the testimony of Mr. Gabriel Adejare, a retired deputy director of Nigeria Plant Quarantine Services (NAQS), Ibadan office, the recent invasion of his cassava farms by people suspected to be area boys was enough to discourage him from continuing with cassava farming. However, he said with his years of experience in cassava business, the number of years he has invested into farming, as well as the ongoing assistance and support he is presently receiving and enjoying from the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (ITTA), Ibadan, Oyo State, nothing he said, can make him step aside from cassava farming, not even this recent experience from the men of the underworld.

Explaining to Tribune Agriculture the loss he suffered from the hands of midnight robbers whom he suspected to be area boys, the IITA cassava contract farmer stated that what actually pained him most was that the cassava tubers harvested and stolen by the yet-to-be apprehended area boys were not due for harvest, adding that the new variety was given to him by the (IITA) for field trial.

“The area boys came to the farm in the midnight, harvested the immature tubers and inserted the cassava sticks back into the ground to create an impression that nothing had happened. In fact, you can hardly know that the tubers had been removed from the cassava sticks if not for the rain storm that fell the sticks,” he explained.

Adejare also said the same thing happened to one of his friends who is also a cassava farmer. He, however, advised cassava farmers in the country to beef up securities on their farms, stressing that the new methods hoodlums area boys are now using, invade farms to steal cassava tubers may not be unconnected with the recent high prices of cassava tubers and other cassava by-products such as flour, chips, fufu, starch and most especially garri.

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