Fertilizer subsidy is a mirage – Farmers

The promise by government to make available to farmers as much as 180,000 metric tonnes of subsidised fertilizer for the 2015 farming season has been a ‘mirage’ so far, members of the Peasant Farmers Association of Ghana (PFAG) have said, asking government to make good its promise.

“We have still not received the subsidised fertilizer in most of the farming districts,” President of PFAG Abdul-Rahman Mohammed said in Accra, during a workshop to validate research findings on whether the Export Trade, Agricultural & Industrial Development Fund is benefitting small-holder farmers.

“We therefore call on government to release it with immediate effect, since the farming season is already in progress,” he said.

Some of the farmers indicated that the market price of up to Gh¢125 for a bag of fertilizer is beyond their means, and that if government does not make the subsidy available their output will greatly diminish.

“The recent floods affected our site. I for one lost a full acre of rice, and so we were thinking this subsidised fertilizer would be given to us to reduce our pain,” said Mrs. Emma Ankrah of the Ashaiman Irrigation Project area.

Through the subsidy programme, government is expected to bear up to 21% of the price for various types of fertilizer to make them affordable to small-holders.

The government introduced the fertilizer subsidy programme in 2008 in response to what was discovered to be very low fertilizer use in the country, and the reason was that prices were beyond reach of the small-holder farmers who produce the bulk of food in the country.

Fertilizer application rate in Ghana was estimated to be 8kg per hectre compared to 20kg/ha in sub-Saharan Africa, 99kg/ ha in Latin America, 109 kg/ha in South Asia, and 149 kg/ha in east and south east Asia.

The target set by government was to increase fertilizer use rate to at least 50kg per hectre by 2020, as recommended in the Medium Term Agricultural Sector Investment Programme of the Ministry of Food and Agriculture.

While it is not clear whether the rates of application have improved, MoFA records indicate that between 2008 and 2013 a total of 724,055 metric tonnes of fertilizer have been subsidised at a cost of Gh¢345.244million cedis.

“Without the fertilizer, how are we going to produce? The market price of the compound fertilizer today is between Gh¢125 and 135, which is too costly for small-holder farmers,” Abdul Rahman Mohammed said.