Ministry of Agriculture and Livestock Development Cabinet Secretary (CS) Mithika Linturi has urged farmers across the country to register with the Ministry in order to benefit from the government’s subsidy on fertilizers.
Speaking at Luuma Primary School in Tigania East when he helped raise funds for the construction of a multi-purpose hall, the CS said that the second phase of the farmers’ registration will kick off soon and stressed that only registered farmers will benefit.
“In the first phase we registered over five million farmers across the country and soon we will launch the second phase and the only way you can benefit is to have your name in the system,” he said.
He added: “We also encourage farmers to form groups where they will benefit from incoming government initiatives.”
Linturi noted that the government is committed to reducing the cost of living by subsidizing production.
He disclosed that from a high of Ksh6,500 for a 50-kilogram bag of fertilizer a year ago, the commodity was now selling at Ksh2,500.
“When people talk of going to the streets to press for reduction of cost of living for Kenyans, they don’t know what they are doing. We can only achieve that by going to our farms and producing food,” he said.
The CS spoke even as the government announced that the reformulation of part of 34,000 tonnes of fertilizer that had been donated by the Russian government had kicked off, with the aim of churning out 100,000 tonnes of the farm input for distribution to farmers.
According to data released by the Agriculture Ministry, at least 1.72 million bags of planting fertilizer and 1.3 million bags of the top dressing input were redeemed by farmers in the country’s food basket areas of Rift Valley and Mt. Kenya regions where maize, potatoes, coffee, sugar cane, and horticultural crops are grown.
By John Majau
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