GES: Food prices expected to drop by mid April---Cellulant

Cellulant Nigeria

*Governments, development partners and private sector to collaborate.

There is high indication that food prices are expected to start going down as from middle of April 2017 just as a call went out to government and other relevant partners to collaborate in term of financial support for Growth Enhancement Support Scheme (GES).This was contained in a statement made available by Cellulant Nigeria Limited in Abuja.

The company explained that “rice is one of the major staple foods in Nigeria and its importation is a significant contributor to the balance of trade deficit and concomitantly to the Naira's exchange rate. From the 383,636 rice farmers that received inputs during the 2016 dry season program, enough food will be produced to feed 120,000,000 Nigerians for 2 months. We are expecting the food price inflation that started in 2016 when Growth Enhancement Support Scheme (GES) didn't take place in 2015, to begin to drop by mid April 2017. By maintaining this effort and reaching out to 3,028,434 rice farmers in the 2017 GES wet season, Nigeria will be able to achieve self sufficiency in the rice value chain as stated by the Federal Government of Nigeria.”

The statement continued that in the GES, 660,112 farmers were financially included and over 450,000 farmers received farm inputs across 30 states in 60 days and that  the gap between what the Government wanted to achieve and what could actually be achieved due to the available budget provides evidence that there was a need for Governments, development partners and private sector to collaborate in developing a strong financial mechanism that ensures that programs in agriculture are properly funded and that the mechanisms that allow private sectors capital to flow into agriculture on a large scale must be allowed to thrive.

The report states that Government contributed more than half of the price of farm inputs sold by the private sector to farmers. “Farmers also made their own equity contribution. It is evident that for every one dollar invested, the FGN stimulated the creation of another dollar of economic activity in the market place. GES can then be described as a quantitative easing mechanism (Injection of new money into the economy) into the rural areas. In Nigeria where there is a clear disconnect between Broad Street (Financial sector) and Main Street (our inner cities and rural areas), interventions like GES become very important when it comes to the creation of real growth in the economy.”

Below is the rest of the statement:

In the 2016 Dry Season, Messers Cellulant with the full consent of the FGN started to layer financial services to Agricultural services provided for farmers, using the Agrikore frameworks. Farmers are now connected to service points where they can access financial and agricultural services. Although the FGN could not make available the price supports to more than 500,000 farmers, we observed that an additional 201,614 farmers over and above the 458,498 farmers who received subsidised inputs during the 60 days of inputs collection, came out to revalidate their data, open an account and also paid the full price for the inputs. This proves that if the farmers are properly financially included Government can convert the current price support mechanism into a financial support mechanism. This in our view is the key to unlock the private sector capital on a large scale to the smallholder farmers.

Cellulant wishes to thank the FGN who since 2011 believed that it was possible to eliminate corruption, promote transparency and leverage on technology for Agricultural Transformation. And this exercise which was continued in 2016 by the current administration has proven that a technology that came out of Africa (Nigeria) has the potential to change the world.

The GES program which was launched in 2012 with the purpose of easing farmers’ access to farm inputs resumed in 2016 after a year’s break in 2015. The Federal Government took the opportunity offered by the program to promote financial inclusion to farmers