Date: 2014-03-23

THE federal government at the weekend unfolded plans to distribute subsidised farm input to 8 million registered farmers during the 2014 farming season.
The Director, Fertiliser, Federal Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development, Akinbolawa Osho, while briefing the media in Abuja on the 2014 Wet Season Growth Enhancement Scheme (GES) in outhern States, pointed out that the initiative was aimed at supplying fertilizers and high yielding seeds to farmers through their mobile phones.

He noted that 10.5 million farmers have been registered from 2012 till date and are all entitled to access the subsidised input. He also said the government is targeting not less than 8 million and not more than 10 million farmers for the 2014 GES across the federation, including Borno, Yobe and Adamawa States.

Osho regretted that even though over 10 million farmers had been registered between the 2012/2013 farming season, only over 6 million in both the wet and dry season farming had redeemed their input, due to many challenges, which include poor communication and lack of funds by the farmers.

The director revealed that the Roll Out season which is set to be carried out in two phases would begin on Monday, March 24 for seven days across the southern states while the second phase is set to commence on the first week of April across the central states including Kogi, Kwara and Taraba, whose ecologies are similar to those of the South.

He said: “The need to target 8 million farmers followed the need to revalidate the data of registered farmers across the states to ensure that they are indeed residents of their localities.”

The revalidation exercise, according to him, “is a joint effort between the ministry and the National Identification Management Commission (NIMC) in which the data of farmers are to be captured and stored in the NIMC data banks using biometrics in line with the federal government policy to have not only farmers but all Nigerians in a contained data bank.”