Deputy Minister for Food and Agriculture, Dr. Ahmed Alhassan Yakubu, has denied claims by the Member of Parliament (MP) for Walewale that the national fertilizer subsidy programme has collapsed.
The Walewale MP, Dr. Sagre Babangi stated that President John Mahama’s promise to deliver 180,000 metric tons of subsidized fertilizer to small holder farmers has not been realized.
This, he said has affected crop production in the three regions of the North and is likely to plunge thousands of farmers and households into poverty.
[contextly_sidebar id=”3pyEWCoo3ThoDUep19Lu2mgbOb9aYnVO”]But Dr. Yakubu in an interview on Eyewitness News discounted the claims saying, “it is absolutely untrue that the fertilizer programme has collapsed.”
According to him, the programme was reintroduced in 2008 and has been running since 2013 but in 2014, the Ministry of Food and Agriculture was unable to roll out the programme due to debts owed the fetrlizer companies.
“The Ministry of Food and Agriculture was ready to roll out the 2014 programme totaling about 180,000 metric tons of fertilizer delivered to the farmers. Unfortunately, the payment for 2013 was still outstanding.”
“These fertilizers are taken from private companies and delivered to farmers but because the payment was outstanding, we couldn’t roll out the programme because the companies will not delay unless the outstanding were paid,” he explained.
The Deputy sector Minister argued that the delay in the release of money to fund the fertilizer subsidy programme does not mean that the project has collapsed
“There were financial challenges within the Ministry of Food and Agriculture and we simply didn’t have the money to pay up for 2013 fertilizer,” he added.
He stressed that the failure of government to release funding for the programme in no way suggests that the policy is of little or no importance to the government.
Dr. Yakubu admitted that budgetary allocations are made for various sectors of the economy but programmes such as the national fertilizer subsidy programme does not fully serve its purpose because “the money to provide it have simply not been found.”
By: Efua Idan Osam/citifmonline.com/Ghana
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