The president of the Nigeria Agro Input Dealers Association (NAIDA) Alhaji Kabiru Fara has said that the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) and Federal Government (FG) were both responsible for the scarcity of fertilizer in the country. Fara disclosed this during in an exclusive interview with FoodFarmNews in his residence in Kano.
He alleged that both the apex bank and FG have denied farmers access to fertilizer because of inappropriate handling of the situation with prices at variance saying that “what happens is that the Central Bank Nigeria enters the business and approved one dealer to supply all the farmers and maize farmers association at the price of 7, 000 naira. Meanwhile, the same FG, also discounted the price for the agro dealers at N4, 500.00 naira, while farmers are to buy at 5,000 naira, but the CBN is buying it 7,000 naira. So the question then is who will sell it to agro-dealers.”
The input dealers’ boss said the CBN had hijacked the fertilizer distribution business because they were in the custody of money and may not necessarily need to wait for any budget before spending, saying this was opposite to what it used to be during President Goodluck Jonathan where Nigeria Incentive Based Risk Sharing System for Agricultural Lending (NIRSAL) was being used to derisk agriculture business with access to loan and inputs.
Fara faulted the implementation style of the present administration of fertilizer saying the hike price of the input cannot allow profit to be made as he stressed that ‘’Right now, so many farmers farmed without input particularly fertilizer, and what this means is that the output will be lower and food commodities price will skyrocket.”
He added that the corona-virus epidemic also played a very vital role against the availability of the urea to produce NPK 20: 10:10 as most of the companies producing urea were closed down with no any proactive action from the FG to quickly rescue the situation on time.
The head of input suppliers who complained that the minister was not even welcoming the stakeholders to say their mind but instead preferred going around the country talking to the farmers instead of engaging agro dealers who volunteer to use their money to buy the inputs and bring to farmers.
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