By Jacob Onuha Nelson
The Ministry of Agriculture and food security has urged the government to fund the ministry in order to achieve its plans.
Addressing the journalists on Tuesday, Abdelbagi Hussein Akol, the minister of Agriculture and food security, stated that the ministry has got challenges that needs properly funding.
“First of all, the government of South Sudan has challenges on economic issues. It’s not only the ministry of agriculture and food security” he said
“But we are doing our best as the government to make sure that we are tackling the issues of economics,” the Minister added.
He said the issues are of structures that ministry has as policy to distribute to various farmers in other states.
“Secondly, the issue of structures. We in the Ministry of Agriculture and Food Security, we have a policy, how we can distribute the structures to the farmers. One of them, we are working with the states and we start distributing to some of the states which are ready now because of the security issues, which are ready to farm,” he noted.
He said the ministry does distribute three structures to each an every state to establish the Agro-mechanical center where farmers can launch and go to farm and come back
He said the ministry is working hard to make sure that the funds are released, adding that this year, the ministry is going to conduct conference on issue of economic and funding problems.
“Very soon, we are working to make sure that the funds are released and also we are making sure that we are working very hard to make sure that we are going to conduct our conference because one of the things that we postponed for our conference was the economic and funding problems,” Hussein stated.
The minister claimed that the ministry had engaged with the head of economic cluster, and the response is hopeful that the economic cluster is going to fund next farming season.
“According to the promise that we have from our head of Cluster, we are going to tackle our issues, especially in the agriculture because agriculture is one of the priorities of the government of South Sudan,” he assured the public.
However, the Ministry of Agriculture in South Sudan has been facing numerous challenges, that include inadequate infrastructure, poor access to inputs like high-quality seeds and fertilizers, limited funding, and the impacts of climate change like floods and droughts.