FG INSISTS ON CELLPHONES FOR FAMERS

AGAINST the background of criticisms trailing the policy, the Federal government on Monday insisted on the procurement of cellphones by farmers in the country to enable government to reach them directly by cutting off middlemen especially in the distribution of farming inputs.

Government has also denied the existence of any plan to spend N60billion to procure 10million cellphones as it informed that it only planned to subsidize the cost of cellphones which would be procured directly by the farmers from private cellphones dealers.

The Minister of Agriculture, Dr. Akinwumi Adesina, who briefed State House correspondents in Abuja on Monday, explained the necessity for the procurement of cellphones and rejected suggestions that that government was spending N60billion for the initiative.  

He explained that using cellphones to distribute agriculture inputs to farmers in the country was  not new as it has been successfully adopted in the past.

According to him, in the first year of the Growth Enhancement Support (GES) scheme, 1.2 million farmers received their subsidized fertilizers and seeds via their cell phones and this is expected to have reached 1.5 million farmers by the end of the current dry season.

“Let me say, that this singular effort to get inputs to farmers directly resulted in the addition of an estimated 8.1 million metric tons of food to the domestic food supply. This addition helped to mitigate the effect of the flood on the nation’s food supply and we were able to avoid a food crisis,” he said.

The Minister added: “Some people are asking questions like, “Why cellphones for farmers?” “Will the fertilizers and seeds be attached to the cellphones?” “Will tractors be attached to the cellphones”?

“As you can see from the above explanation the answer is “Yes!” It is actually the cell phone that has provided us with the tool to directly access each farmer thereby saving them from corrupt middlemen who make their fortune from exploiting the poor.”

He pointed out that it was wrong to argue that Nigerian farmers were uneducated and cannot use cell phones.

Dr. Adesina stated: “The evidence does not support that. Under the GES scheme, we made it possible for farmers to transact business in their own local languages using their cellphones. From data we collected based on farmers’ use of cellphones to access fertilizers and seeds last year, we found that the total number of transactions done by phone with respect to the GES scheme was 4.9 million.

“Of these, 1.2 million were in English, 620,000 were in Pidgin, 2.2 million were in Hausa, and 854,000 were in Yoruba and 344 were in Igbo. From this data, we have no doubt that our farmers are well able to use cellphones.

“Nigeria is the first country in Africa to launch a GES scheme that delivers farm inputs to farmers using cellphones. We are very proud of this achievement. Several other African countries now want to adopt the same system,” he stressed.

The Minister remarked that even though Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) study confirmed that 71% of the nation’s 14million farmers have no cellphones, government cannot get cellphones to 10million farmers

“This is impractical to say the least. Our plan is a gradual scale up. We intend to get about 2 million phones to farmers who do not have phones this year,”

Source: Tribune