The decline in cotton production in Gombe State and the country in particular has been attributed to a lot of factors with the government taking the larger part of the blame.
Farmers, especially, yearn for the good old days when cotton farming and production was attractive and rewarding and plead with government to return them to those glorious days.
Gombe, usually referred to as Gombe State is located in the north eastern part of Nigeria. There, the history of cotton production dates back to the 1940s when the British Cotton Growers Association (BCGA) set up a collection centre about five kilometers from the then Gombe town from where they collect cotton from farmers after the harvest season.
The development led the colonial masters, who ruled the country at the time, to construct a railway line linking Gombe and Lagos for easy transportation of cotton to the seaports in Lagos and onward export to Liverpool in the United Kingdom and other developed countries.
The BCGA area, which was initially a collection centre, gradually metamorphosed into a residential area after labourers who usually spend the night there loading cotton into the trains for transportation to Lagos, started to build houses and settle with their families.
In the late 1970s and early 80s, the BCGA area gradually merged with the nearby villages to form the BCGA residential quarters in the present Gombe State.
Nevertheless, there are still some indigenous companies like Nasara Agro-Industrial Company Limited (NAICO), West African Cotton (WACOT) and OLAM that buy cotton from the farmers, process and sell to textile owners outside the state as there is no single textile factory there, according to All Farmers Association of Nigeria (AFAN).
The withdrawal of government from cotton farming dealt the sector a huge blow from which it is yet to recover 20 years hence. Apart from lack of good seedlings, pesticides, fertilizers and stable price, insecurity is another problem that contributed in crippling cotton production in Gombe. It was gathered that herdsmen invaded the farms and destroyed crops, close to the time of harvest.
