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A Town Hall meeting to check the crisis between herdsmen and communities/farmers in Abia State held yesterday ruling that while herdsmen should not carry arms and not graze in the night, cattle should not be poisoned by aggrieved communities/farmers whose farms and crops were/are being destroyed by grazing cattle.
Owners of grazed farms however told the audience that they would not continue to endure future destruction of their crops by cattle and their rearers whom were accused of deliberately destroying their crops and farms including causing other economic damage to them.
Speaking at the meeting the Chairman of the State All Farmers Association of Nigeria (ALFAN) Chief Dunlop Okoro decried the practice of herdsmen destroying farms and crops despite the hospitality they were accorded by farmers in the state. He lamented that instead of reciprocating this hospitality, the herdsmen with impunity destroy farms and their crops even without provocation.
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He said, ” Abia farmers are friendly, there has been an existing peace accord between farmers and herdsmen in the state but the cattlerearers flout the accord, we are tired of being paid back with destruction of our farms and crops”. He recalled that there were no such problems in the past when cattle owners brought down their cows and sold them in the market.
” Let them be doing so now rather than bring the cows to graze here and in the process destroy our farmlands and crops. Okoro frowned at some security agents who he accused of seemingly pampering the herdsmen when their cattle wreak havoc on farmlands instead of charging them according to the law.
