Contest: "Writing expedition" | Plantation agriculture in East and west Africa |

I bring to you all a special greeting from this part of the world members of @steemkidss and to all steemians all over the world, welcome to my blog today am very happy participating in this contest organised by the steemkidss official account I found today's topic interesting so i decided to participate in it. Hello, christians and most especially Catholic members all over the world hope you all are preparing for the resurrection of our lord Jesus Christ by keeping this week holy, and to all Muslims how is your Ramadan going? I pray that God gives us the strength to finished what we all have started Amen 🙏.

Without wasting much of your time, below I am going to give all the details you need to know about plantation agriculture in East and west Africa.

Definition

Source
Plantation agriculture involves the cultivation of crops in large areas of land or plantation, the system lays emphasis on the production of restricted number of crops for commercial purpose such crops include: cocoa, rubber or palm oil, cotton, coffee and tea.

Origin of plantation agriculture in Africa

Source
Plantation agriculture is first introduced by the European colonists, the French and Belgians who encourage the setting up of these farms in their colonies like Ghana, Nigeria🇳🇬 and Sierra Leone. It requires marriage and huge capital to set up, it also required all kind of labour. The skilled semi - skilled and the unskilled on the farms large commercial plantation exist in both West and East Africa for instance The bacita sugar estate in kwara state Nigeria, the rubber plantation in ikor mbo near Calabar the capital of cross river state Nigeria, the tea and coffee plantation on the mambila plateaux in Nigeria etc. As a sort of encouraging the government particularly in large plantations ownership, while some plantations are operated by foreign commercial organisations.

Most plantations makes use of technology and improved varieties of seedlings as well as herbicides and insecticides to fight disease and weeds in plantation.

Requirements for the establishment of plantation

• Large areas of land that's well fertile
• Skilled labour for the management of the farms.
• Large supply of cheap, unskilled labour within the area where the plantation is located.
• Huge capital for the provision of infrastructural facilities.
• Availability of water either in the form of regular and steady rain or in form of modern irrigation system.

Importance of plantation agriculture

• The local people learn new skills and how to operate machines, plant seeds and so on and they transmit the skills to their communities.
• plantation agriculture create and opportunity for the rural people to earn wages and this helps to reduce the rate of migration are set up in the rural areas.
• Plantation farms brings about general development in the areas where they are established.

This can be in areas of building of houses for workers and infrastructure.

• Plantation brings about the production of good quality produce inine with modern production method.

Problems of plantation agriculture

• Plantations are often plagued by labour dispute between management and workers due to agitation for wage increase and other changes in working conditions that reduce their profit ability.
• Local farmers and sellers becomes displaced always in the process of acquiring the land which may result in suffering and irrigation to other places.

Current happenings

Source
Africa government have realised the need for setting up plantations due to their interest in promoting export of agriculture products and the development of local industries. In other words, the government have realise the need for sell suffiency in both food production and setting up of industries.
Equally, the Nigerian government have barned the importation of wheat into the country as a way of encouraging farmers to go into wheat production considerable sum of money has been always released to farmers for irrigation and other necessary facilities use to produce wheat.

Thanks for reading 🙏