FG addresses technical hitches in farmers’ scheme

The Federal Government said on Monday that it would address all the technical hitches threatening the Growth Enhancement Support (GES) scheme.

Charles Momo, the FCT federal director of agriculture, stated this in an interview with the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) in Abuja.

The GES scheme is a Federal Government initiative under the Agricultural Transformation Agenda (ATA), aimed at susbsidising the cost of major agricultural inputs such as fertiliser and seeds.

Under the initiative, farmers access inputs through an electronic distribution channel known as the e-Wallet.

The conditions of the e-Wallet scheme stipulates that a farmer registered under the scheme, pays 50 percent of the cost of farm inputs, while the federal and state governments pay 25 percent each.

One of the requirements for the scheme is the farmers’ registration exercise, where farmers’ data are captured into the ministry’s central data bank.

It was also gathered that some farmers who registered within the metropolis had received an SMS alert to redeem their inputs at Abaji, a suburb of the FCT.

Also, some poultry farmers complained that they received alert to redeem fertiliser and seedlings instead of day-old chicks and poultry feeds.