Ninety-nine percent of Ogbaru Local Women live in the fifteen towns and villages of Ogbaru and are self-employed. Basically they are a combination of housewives, petty traders and eminently subsistence farmers. Culturally, the men cultivate the main Ogbaru cash crops, which is yam and cassava. Women, therefore grow mainly vegetables and potatoes. Some are venturing into growing cassava.

Subsistence farming does not only provide occupation but also livelihood and support for ones family. It is often labor intensive. The average Ogbaru Local Woman rises at dawn, well before sunrise to trek to a farm plot some two to five kilometers away. Some cross the great River Niger to the farm islands known as agwe. Work on the farm continues for hours, with no mechanical farming implements until high noon when the wrath of the sun becomes unbearable. The women must then harvest whatever they need for food or for sale at the local market, gather firewood for cooking and retrace their way home. More often than not, they must carry their farm wares and produce in a basket (Ukpa) and on their head, the weight notwithstanding. Often they are forced to keep their children from school to help out with the farming or house chores.

The travails of Local Ogbaru Women are replicated and continue in many Nigerian communities. But Ogbaru women are in a sense extremely lucky. Unlike their counterparts in other riverine and oil producing areas, they can still do their subsistence farming and fishing. The Ogbaru lands are still very fertile especially after each rainy season and have not been pillaged and made desolate because of the activities of the multinationals prospecting for oil.

But the challenges faced by the Local Ogbaru women occur against the backdrop of failed public policies in Nigeria. Lip service has been paid infinitely to supporting subsistence farming and mechanizing the process, as is the case in Indonesia and Malaysia, all to no avail. Numerous programmes such as Operation Feed the Nation, Green Revolution and DFRRI were introduced by successive regime including those led by Presidents Obasanjo, Shagari and Babaginda. All said, Government attitude to agriculture has remained lukewarm to the extent that Nigeria is no longer able to feed itself.

The travails of Local Ogbaru Women are further compounded by the fact that they belong to the fifty per cent of Africans who live under one dollar per day. Hyperinflation and devaluation of the local currency means that their vegetables and other farm produce no longer fetch enough revenue to support their families. The tedium of everyday life and the rigors of hard labor places Ogbaru Local Women in a special category: their average annual per capita income is less than 200 dollars, life expectancy is 51 years, and only 7 percent of the women are literate.

The irony of the realities faced by the Local Ogbaru Women is in itself a paradox. Ogbaru lands are highly fertile and Nigeria is a richly endowed country. Indeed, Ogbaru was the breadbasket that sustained the Biafran enclave during the grueling thirty-month Nigerian civil war. Another reality is that Ogbaru women belong to the league of women who are said to produce half of the food that is grown in sub-Saharan Africa. Yet their saga continues. The challenge faced by these women range from lack of governmental assistance in terms of small-farming loans, credit amenities, cooperatives that assist with technical know-how and non-existent transportation and storage systems for perishable food and commodities.

United Nations figures indicate that in this day and age, hunger still kills people. According to the United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan "As many as 24,000 people die of hunger each day". But in Ogbaru anyone killed by hunger is deemed to have been killed by his or her own laziness. The land is there to be tilled and it is a fertile land too.

But there are challenges, which are not being met. And many will not be met unless Ogbaruans find a way to articulate and put in place collectivized farming and cooperatives that will help the local women. Implements like tractors and pushcart tilling machines could be communally purchased and owned, or leased at nominal fees. These women also need to own and run their community-based nurseries with little expert help, contrary to what prevails now where the few existing nurseries are owned by individuals who charge exorbitant prices and serviced by poorly paid and agriculturally and scientifically challenged and uninstructed staff.

Ogbaru cultural norms must also be married with governmental polices in matters such as land ownership. This would address issues such as discriminatory laws and practices for inheritance and of access and ownership to land. Unquestionably, there should be measures to help change gender bias in agriculture and enable women play their subsistence farming roles more effectively. As it is, the Ogbaru man as a consummate fisherman cum farmer belongs to a disappearing bred. They too, have become victims of the wrenching phenomenon that has turned the average Igbo man to buying and selling merchant or to riding an Okada, neither of which requires more than the rudimentary ability to count the local currency. In the face of this disappearing act, Local Ogbaru Women, who remain the mainstay and anchor of the Ogbaru homestead cannot be misconstrued as mere usurpers to the Ogbaru farming culture. Indeed, they are the heirs apparent.

Since Local Ogbaru Women are into basic foodstuffs cultivation, which are by any means perishable, they need to be assisted with modern ways of storage and handling, marketing and processing food, especially in the face of the bad Ogbaru roads that militates against these goods reaching market city of Onitsha in a timely manner. More importantly, most Ogbaru Local Women, faced with losing their farm products are forced to undersell them. Sustainable agriculture in the real sense does not only apply to the mechanized countries and their industrial farming complex. In places like Ogbaru, where the community relies on the soil for its every-day subsistence, survival depends wholly on commonsensical and proper use of the land, the environment, the avoidance water pollution, desertification and deforestation. Correct water management must implicitly be extended to managing water supplies and irrigation and controlling erosion as means of ensuring optimum results. These women must be taught how to cope in other to bring added value to what they are already doing.

UN statistics indicates that more than one billion people are without safe drinking water. Local Ogbaru Women also belong to this category. With exception of Atani, none of the fifteen autonomous Ogbaru communities has pipe borne water. In places like Umuodu, Ogbakuba, Umunakwo, the artisan wells and boreholes sunk with assistance from United Nations agencies have run dry. UN statistics also indicates that some two billion people lack the energy they need to pump water or light their homes. Ditto Ogbaru towns. Ironically, in nearby countries like Niger, Chad and Burkina Fasso which Nigeria supply electricity, power supply is hardly interrupted. Not so in Ogbaru and other Nigerian towns