The National Farmers and Fishermen Award Winners Association of Ghana (NFFAWAG) has appealed to the government to release fertiliser subsidies to fertiliser distributors.
It said many of the companies had stopped supplying subsidised fertiliser to farmers due to the delay in the release of the subsidy amounts to them.
At a press conference in Accra, the Chairman of NFFAWAG, Mr Davies Korboe, said the situation had forced farmers to buy fertilisers at high prices on the open market.
As a result, he said, farmers in the southern and middle belts of Ghana were likely to record low yields because of the weather, compared to what they were getting previously.
Mr Korboe said farmers were excited early this year when the Minister of Food and Agriculture, Mr Fifi Kwetey, announced that 180,000 metric tons of granular fertiliser were to be subsidised for the 2015 farming seasons and that about seven companies had been selected for the programme.
However, he said, Yara Ghana Limited, one of the companies contracted to supply fertiliser under the programme, had pulled out as a result of the delay in the terms of payment.
Again, Mr Korboe said, other fertiliser distributors, including Cherice Ghana Limited, Afcott Ghana Limited, AMG West Africa Limited, Louis Dreyfus Commodities Limited and ETC Ghana Limited “were battling with issues concerning exchange rate differentials with the Ministry of Finance.”
Therefore, he said, any further delay in resolving the problem could jeorpardise the quantities supplied under the programme.
The target groups under the fertiliser subsidy programme are primarily smallholder farmers and women cultivating maize, rice, sorghum and millet.
Subsidised fertilisers were selling at GH¢89 per 50kilogramme (kg) bag and GH¢84 per 50kg bag for compound fertiliser and urea respectively.
Mr Korboe said with the current situation, farmers were compelled to buy fertiliser at between GH¢120 and GH¢130 on the open market. “As the members of the NFFAWAG, we cannot fold our arms and allow our women, peasant and smallholder farmers to go through the pain of buying fertiliser at such prices when indeed the government has given them hope of getting fertiliser at a subsidised rate,” he said.
Mr Korboe said the National Fertiliser Subsidy Programme, which was born out of the Abuja Declaration on Fertiliser for an African Green Revolution, sought to enhance food production and security in the country.
He said the introduction of the programme had been a contributory factor to improved food production in the country lately, compared to the pre-fertiliser subsidy period.
The target set was to increase fertiliser use rate from the current eight kg per hectare to at least 50 kg per hectare by 2020 as recommended in the Medium-Term Agricultural Sector Investment Programme of the Ministry of Food and Agriculture.
Source: ghanaweb
