The Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development, Alhaji Sabo Nanono said the ministry officials had been barred from further participation in the production and sake of fertilizer going forward.
The minister said the primary role of the ministry would henceforth be restricted to quality control, pricing and delivery of the commodity.
Speaking at the opening of a consultative meeting with relevant stakeholders on the development of template for the administration of subsidy to the smallholder farmers on sustainable basis, Nanono fertilizer sale and production, “is not our business now” adding that the current target was to ensure that fertiliser reached the small scale farmers.
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He said: “I wish to state categorically that our target is for small scale farmers. Secondly, the primary role of the Federal Ministry of Agriculture would now be quality control, price and delivery.
“There is no more ministry participation in the production of selling of fertiliser, that is not our business now.”
He said the intention of the federal government was to make fertilizer private sector driven in such a way that every farmer in country would readily access the commodity.
This is as the Minister of Finance, Budget and National Planning, Mrs. Zainab Ahmed, said the goal of the proposed fertiliser subsidy scheme” is not simply to transfer subsidies to farmers. No, our design principle is to reward behavior such as purchase of fertilizer by data-identified smallholder farmers as opposed to simply wire monies to anyone who claims to be smallholder farmers or subsidising large-scale farmers.”
Nanono, however, said preparatory to the provision of the subsidy support for farmers, about five million farmers had so far been registered with biometrics as well as captured through the farm GIS coordinates.
He pointed out that the ministry had developed the database of the smallholder farmers for easy targeting with the fertilizer subsidy support.
According to him, the primary concern of the federal government is how to get majority of the smallholder farmers out of extreme poverty through targeted support in order to increase their level of productivity, household incomes and by extension guarantee food security for the country.
Nanono stressed that in order to support the teeming smallholder farmers, President Muhammadu Buhari had approved that an implementation template be developed through consultative engagement with the relevant stakeholders on the best way of administering fertiliser subsidy to the them nationwide on sustainable basis.