The Dangote Sugar Refinery (DSR) located in Numan, Adamawa State, has enabled more than 781 farmers to engage in sugarcane farming, with the aim of lowering the unemployment rate within the company’s host community.
In the business’s farmlands, sugarcane was grown by farmers working under the direction of the Out-Growers Farmers Association. The company supplied the necessary seeds, fertilizer, pesticide, and other farming tools to the farmers.
Thousands of young people in the state’s local government districts of Shelleng, Demsa, Lamurde, Guyuk, and Numan received direct and indirect labor through the DSR, Numan’s Out-Growers program, according to information obtained by our reporter on Sunday.
The farmers claim that the corporation purchases their sugarcane after harvest, with the money taken out to cover the cost of the farm inputs that were previously given to them during planter.
According to several of the farmers who spoke with our correspondent, they have completely given up on rice and cotton farming in favor of sugarcane production, which they claim is “more profitable,” since the program’s introduction.
A sugarcane farmer named Mr. Adamu Magani claims that the out-growers program was started by the Dangote sugar refinery approximately ten years ago as a way to aid the host villages and reduce poverty.
The farmers received land allocations from the firm, along with all the inputs required to sustain us. However, the farmer will tend to the land until it is ready for agriculture, which typically takes 18 months.
Following harvest, the business would purchase our sugarcane after taking out all of the cash for the agricultural equipment they gave us throughout the crop,” he explained.
According to Mr. Magani, the company purchased sugarcane by the ton last year, at a cost exceeding N17,000.
A hectare can yield roughly 170 tons of sugarcane after harvest, depending on how you manage your field. After all the deductions, I made almost N2 million in net profit last year,” he stated.
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As subsistence farmers, we used to plant rice, guinea corn, and cotton and most of the time, we found it hard to even feed our families, but now that I have ventured into several investments courtesy of the sugarcane farming, I can easily take care of my family of ten. Magani continued, “before we introduced the scheme”
In the meantime, the Dangote Sugar Refinery (DSR) said that its Backward Integration Project (BIP) in Numan, Adamawa State, employed a minimum of 7,000 workers annually.
Bello Abdullahi Dan-Musa, Group General Manager of Operations, stated that the employees were engaged during the busiest time of the year during a media visit of the Numan facility.
According to Dan-Musa, the majority of the staff members are frequently hired temporarily during the cane-producing season.
He said that the out-growers received payment from the corporation for their sugarcane production under the Out-Grower’s program of more than N500 million very recently.
He claims that the corporation is upgrading from its current capacity of 4,800 tons of cane per day to 6,000 tons by the end of 2023, 9,800 tons by 2024, and 15,000 tons by the end of 2025.
Chinnaya Sylvain Judex, the Chief Executive Officer and Managing Director, stated that the expansion drive has accomplished a noteworthy milestone.
He added that the company’s facilities are environmentally clean and that it has modern machinery to support its production process.
Mr. Judex continued, “By producing 1.5 million metric tons of refined sugar per annum from locally grown sugar cane for both domestic and export markets, the company hopes to become a global player in the sugar production industry.”
According to him, the business runs its own independent power system, and any extra energy will be fed into the national grid.
He asserts that the rapid expansion of the Northeast sub-region’s economy might be greatly aided by the redirection of power from the Dangote Sugar Refinery in Numan to the National Grid.
Mr. Judex continued, “The energy will accelerate the region’s development and industrialization.”
According to our source, the journalists visited the refinery after participating in a two-day environmental reporting program sponsored by the Dangote Group and the Climate Africa Media Initiative Center (CAMIC).
50 chosen journalists from six Northeastern states—Adamawa, Bauchi, Borno, Gombe, Taraba, and Yobe—were pushed to adopt and instill the habit of covering climate change and the environment for sustainability during the two-day workshop.
The goal of the workshop, which had the theme “Reporting the Environment for Sustainability,” was to give the journalists the fundamentals of environmental journalism so they could use them in their everyday reporting.
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