Agriculture Cabinet Secretary Mithika Linturi has urged farmers across the country to register with the ministry in order to benefit from farm inputs subsidy.
The CS said the second phase of farmers’ registration will kick off soon, and asked farmers to grab the opportunity and benefit from the government subsidy.
“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,” Mr Linturi said at Luuma Primary school in Tigania East when he helped raise funds for a multi-purpose hall.
“We also encourage farmers to come together into groups where they will benefit from various initiatives because the government cannot help individuals,” he added.
He said President William Ruto’s administration was committed to reducing the cost of living by subsidizing production and not consumption.
“The only sustainable subsidies that we can have are those on food production because we know that by producing enough food we will be able to feed our people and thus reduce the cost of living,” the CS said.
Mr Linturi said from a high of Sh6,500 for a 50 kilo bag of fertilizer a year ago, the commodity was now selling at Sh2,500, which was a huge relief to farmers.
“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 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
