The Muhammadu Buhari led
government has announced that it will launch the replacement of the Growth
Enhancement Support (GES) scheme known as the Agricultural Inputs Mechanisation
and Management Services (AIMMS) by June.
Audu Ogbeh, Minister of
Agriculture and Rural Development, said this while speaking with newsmen on the
achievements of the current administration in the agriculture sector in three
years.
GES was introduced by the
administration of former President Goodluck Jonathan through his Minister of
Agriculture and Rural Development, Akinwunmi Adesina.
On Monday in Abuja, Ogbeh said
that the programme would enable famers to get subsidised and quality inputs in
various Local Government Areas in the country.
According to him, at least four
distributors of agriculture produce and service providers will be there to
render services to farmers in every council area.
The minister, who said that AIMMS
might not be as cheap and subsidised as the GES, expressed optimism that
farmers would get value for their money.
Ogbeh said that AIMMS
implementation would eradicate the act of selling substandard fertilisers,
chemicals and seeds to farmers as all agro-dealers would be traced through the
distributors.
“We are creating a new
arrangement called AIMMS – Agricultural Inputs Mechanisation and Management
Services.
“We are launching that before the
middle of June so seed companies, fertiliser companies, chemical marketers will
hand over inputs to distributors and farmers will have a place they can go and
source for genuine inputs.
“Farmer may not like it now
because it doesn’t look as cheap as the previous programme but we had a problem
where the agro-dealers many of them were not delivering but were making claims.
“I will rather that farmers are
sure of what they are getting.
“They will get the service and
they will realize soon that whoever sells them fake fertilisers and chemicals,
they can trace, because a lot of fake fertilisers are being sold by a few
people, who are not authorised to blend fertilisers, but who are doing it as a
flight by night business,’’ he said.
Explaining why the Federal
Government under Buhari dropped the GES scheme, Ogbeh said, “I found on arrival
that I owed N67 billion on GES claims and my budget was N33billlion as at then.
“I couldn’t pay and then the
agro-dealers were demonstrating in front of my office. They even wrote that I
had stolen N2billion from their money, they complained.
“I said that we can’t pay a debt
of N67 billion which is twice my ministry’s budget and still continue with the
programme.
“When we came in, some state governors
said they had no money to pay their counterpart support of 25 per cent for GES,
some of them said they couldn’t continue because the economy had crashed.
“Farmers don’t have to worry; we
have their interest at heart.
“AIMMS will be easier for us to handle this
way than for us to pay people who do not deliver but come to us with fake
claims asking us to pay huge sums of money,’’ the minister explained.
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