Morro Manga, director general of national seed secretariat has urged farmers to always be in possession of quality seedling, warning without quality seedling they will not have a good farming season.
Mr Manga said in an interview that quality seeds alone accounts for 10-15 per cent of the overall productivity of a farm.
“Quality seeds alone accounts for 10-15 percent of the overall productivity of farms, the importance of quality seeds cannot be over emphasized and of recent farmers are becoming aware of importance of quality seeds. If you plant low quality seeds you should be expecting very poor yield at the end of the day but comparatively if you plant high quality seed you expect a very high yield with quality at the end of the season,” he disclosed.
He said the country has been over dependent on seeds coming from outside the country which qualities were never tested because of lack of a seed laboratory in the country. He added that since the establishment of the National Seeds Secretariat some of the challenges confronting Gambian farmers are on the declined, thus building the confidence of the people as far as farming is concern in the country.
According to him, quality seeds has great impact on agricultural productivity that farmers must jealously guide at all times, stating that as far as agriculture is concern quality seeds are the basic of production that every farmer needs to know.
He went on that a good number of farmers are having it difficult to differentiate between seeds and grains. Arguing that grains are found everywhere at the market, while seeds can only be certified through rigorous test and monitoring including laboratory tests where grain can be certified as seeds.
“People should understand that there are differences in seeds and grains, many people think that they have seeds but no, they don’t have seeds but grains. Seeds have to go through processes, seeds are monitored from the field right down to the laboratory to test for the moisture, the viability and purity.”
“As far as agriculture is concern seeds is the basic unit of production. Without seeds there will be no production and without production there will be no food and without food everybody will die,” he said.
He said the biggest challenge facing his institution is the issue of limited funding, disclosing that it is the responsibility of the NSS to produce enough seeds to all certified seed growers found in the country with either rice, millet, maize, cow peas among others seeds but due to limited resources this mandate cannot be carried out.
“We want to produce a lot of foundation seeds, but this can only be possible when there are available resources at our disposal,” he stated.
On the recent allocation of D20 million to his institution for the buying of quality seeds from certified Gambian farmers, he revealed that the funds have arrived and has already been used for its purposes.
“I can confirmed that NSS has received the D20M and has already spent D15M out of this allocation to buying seeds from certified seeds growers in Central River Region and the Upper River Region and I can also revealed that the department of agriculture has distributed these seeds to the farmers in various regions of the country. The D5m balance from this allocation will be used to procure farming materials such as tractor, power tiller, harvesters and field truck engine that are earmarked to be used at our various foundation farms across the country.”
He added that various varieties of assorted certified rice seeds that were bought from this allocation has been redistributed among farmers across the regions of the country, disclosing that WCR benefitted 172 bags, LRR 943 bags, NBR 1200 bags, CRR North, 1283, CRR South, 1300 bags and URR, 1237 respectively.
