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A COSTLY MEAL

28/10/2016 06:37:00 By Martin Dlamini

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This week we woke up to shocking news of E22 million worth of farm inputs rotting away after a low number of farmers were enticed by government’s farm input subsidy programme.

This was partly due to the fact that government failed to distribute the inputs timely and that the exercise came right in the middle of a drought season. A classic case of bad timing.
While we applaud the initiative to subsidise food production in a country that is very capable of feeding itself, we are very concerned about the execution of this noble initiative.

Previously, our food production programmes had plenty of rain but lacked full government support. We had become accustomed to insufficient tractors to plough, failure to pay private tractor owners, too few farming instructors to go around, etc.
When the rains disappeared last season, we suddenly had more tractors and even subsidised the inputs with farmers paying only half the price, thanks to the subsidy programme.

However, the inefficiencies of the past returned to haunt the ministry, and government in general, because now we are confronted with delays that have almost rendered the entire exercise a flop.
For many years we have been lobbying government to provide the Ministry of Agriculture a deserved minimum 10 per cent share of the national budget to enable it to feed the nation. Is this what it will do with the money?
What gets confusing is how the same ministry, with access to all the weather predictions that it uses to map out food production initiatives, could roll out a nationwide input subsidy programme wham bam in the middle of the worst drought the country has ever had.

It was expected that farmers would shy away from farming if there was no rain in sight, even if they stood to suffer half the losses given the subsidies.
We are aware that government initially conducted a survey, or should we say feasibility study, before implementing the subsidy programme which was the correct thing to do. Did this process forget about the weather?

The ministry can say it was trying to be proactive by ordering in bulk to make it cheaper while ensuring there would be no delays in supplying the farmers. However, common sense suggests that the drought should have guided this process. Now the taxpayer has to fund the waste because the money used to purchase the inputs was obtained through a loan that has to be paid back.
Come 2016/17 farming season, we are once again running behind schedule. Agriculture Minister Moses Vilakati has assured us that farmers will be satisfactorily serviced with tractors and inputs despite that many areas are yet to see any activity in this regard.

Tractors are stuck in RDAs with no diesel and private tractor owners registered under the government hire service have not been given the green-light to help.
It is equally disappointing, however, to learn that part of the delay has been caused by private tractor owners found to have inflated invoices for the hours they allegedly ploughed during the previous ploughing season.
As a result, the ministry claims to have been busy sorting the genuine from the fraudulent claims, much to the detriment of the farmers who are chasing the early rains.

Principal Secretary in the Ministry of Agriculture Bongani Masuku, said they discovered a lot of rot when they performed checks and balances from the last season. He stressed the fact that not all the owners were dishonest but due to the process, even the innocent tractor owners intent on engaging in honest business with government were being affected.
Here again, why has this process taken so long? Surely these administrative processes could have been done during winter.

On the diesel shortages at a number of RDA, Masuku acknowledges that the situation was frustrating, saying the ministry was working overtime in ensuring that diesel was sourced from those RDA which were operating normally, and supplied to those affected areas in a bid to provide services to all those needing them.

Once again, the response suggests that the ministry didn’t know we were heading for the ploughing season. Sourcing and stocking sufficient fuel in time should have been top priority for the ministry and it knows this.
Sadly, as with all things in this country, the poor must suffer. All these delays put together have dumped a huge bill on the lap of the taxpayer and are likely to cause a serious shortfall in the desired food production targets.