10,000 farmers get input in Ebonyi #nigeria

No fewer than 10,000 farmers in Ebonyi State
have benefitted from various farm input in the state under
the Growth Enhancement Support Scheme (GESS) roll out
programme this year.
The deliverance of the farm input, which include fertilizer,
seeds, cuttings among others, commenced on May.20,
2014, and would last for 10 weeks.
State Director, Federal Ministry of Agriculture and Rural
Development, Dr Anselm Opara, disclosed this in Abakaliki,
the state capital.
His words: "We are targeting 120,000 farmers out of the
200,000 registered in the farmers' database in 2014, as
efforts have been intensified to reach the rest within the
stipulated period."
He noted that "the redemption might be slow presently but
we are optimistic that the tempo would increase because
people like to carry out activities at the last minute."
The state director further disclosed that 60, 000 farmers
were provided with inputs in 2013 as against 5, 600 farmers
that were reached in its inception in 2012.
"In these previous years, seeds were provided free of
charge by the Federal Government but this year, a handling
charge of 10 per cent 20 per cent has been introduced for
seeds such as rice, maize and cassava.
"Two bags of fertilizers will be redeemed at any of the 26
redemption centres across the state by registered farmers,
as registered poultry, fishery and oil palm farmers can now
redeem products at highly subsidized rates," he said. He
noted that the programme has extensively tackled the
network problem being faced by farmers in receiving
information through their GSM network which affects
redemption of inputs.
"We now adopt the point of sale redemption equipment
method where farmers redeem inputs as information would
be transloaded into their phones when they come to areas
that have network.
He noted that the programme now uses the offline method
where the phones of agro dealers are used to transmit
relevant information to them.