Give farmers priority State told
IT is vital for Government to consider postponing funding projects that could wait and put priority on farmers, says Zambia National Farmers Union (ZNFU) president Jervis Zimba.
Mr Zimba says it is therefore imperative for the Ministries of Finance and Agriculture to put priority on the release of funds to pay farmers for crop marketing and input supply. In a statement released in Lusaka, Mr. Zimba said there was need to re-engineer the sequencing of release of budgetary resources to give priority to ventures that were cardinal for propelling agriculture production. He observed that although it was in the middle of crop marketing, farmers were not being paid instantly by the Food Reserve Agency (FRA) for the maize supplied. Mr. Zimba said ZNFU was concerned that such delays would lead to poor implementation of the Farmer Input Supply Programme (FISP) and E-Voucher which were good programmes designed to empower farmers. “We have been compelled to highlight the current worrying situation because of the outcry from our members. “It is also important to highlight that Government has still not fully paid Agribusiness Suppliers for the last season yet the companies must gear up and position inputs for this season,” he said. Mr Zimba said it was worrisome that delayed payments to Agribusiness would attract additional costs which could affect future pricing of inputs making farming costly. He said this was the reason ZNFU has always advocated for a special vault to be created for agriculture production related payments so that diversions to pay for other expenditures could be eliminated.