Food Security: FG to Subsidise Agricultural Inputs by 50%

Gilbert Ekugbe

The federal government, through its Ministry of Agriculture and Food Security, has announced plans to subsidise agricultural input by 50 per cent in the 2023/2024 dry season farming.

The Minister of Agriculture and Food Security, Sen. Abubakar Kyari, said that the move is in line with the actualisation of the present administration’s Renewed Hope Agenda for Nigeria and part of measures to combat food inflation in the country.

In a statement made available on its website, Kyari led several other dignitaries to Hadejia, Jigawa State, to flag off the 2023/2024 dry season farming.

He said that the subsidy would cover a wide range of agricultural inputs, including seeds, fertilizer, herbicides and pesticides that would be delivered to farmers.  

He noted that the 2023/2024 dry season farming is being boosted by an African Development Bank’s (AfDB) facility that is being implemented under the National Agricultural Growth Scheme and Agro-Pocket (NAGS-AP) project.

The implementation is ICT-driven with earlier steps taken to geo-locate farmlands, enumerate, register, and cluster no fewer than 250,000 farmers.

The dry season farming is expected to take place in all the 36 states of the federation and the Federal Capital Territory.

One critical requirement among others is availability of irrigable land where the dry season farming will take place.