Pig farmers belonging to the Oke-Aro Pig Farm Estate in Lagos have called on the state government and Federal Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development to provide them with grants that will enable the recovery of their business.
Pastor Adewale Oluwalana, the president of the piggery estate, made the appeal while explaining to journalists the impact of the African Swine Fever (ASF) outbreak on the farm and the progress that’s been made since.
Oluwalana shared that the farmers had lost all their capital and life savings in the incident and have been unable as of yet to restock and start over again from scratch.
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He added that the farm has the capacity to generate 10,000 employment opportunities but lamented that its activities have been drastically reduced following the ASF outbreak, which killed about 99 percent of the animals on the farm during the COVID-19 lockdown.
“The activities at the farm now is very low, the place is like a ghost of itself. The pigs we have now cannot be more than one percent of what we used to have. We lost so many; before now we have well over 250,000 pigs, we lost about 225,000 pigs. What we have now is so small, we need to restock. We don’t have animals again.
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“For instance someone who used to have like 500 pigs now have less than five, it is so devastating, can someone trade or live on that,” he said.
The estate president thanked the government of Lagos for its donation of chemicals and motorized sprayers, which enabled them to fumigate the farm and prepare it for a new era of business, while still noting that they will need assistance in many areas before they will be able to get back to business as usual.
