FRA gets K171m to help pay off farmers’ maize crop
Thu, 18 Jan 2018 11:26:51 +0000
By MAILESI BANDA
GOVERNMENT has released K171 million to the Food Reserve Agency (FRA), K130 million of which will be used to pay farmers for the maize bought during the last crop marketing season.
Ministry of Agriculture Permanent Secretary, Julius Shawa said the money will be paid out to farmers to enable those that have not managed to pay their counterpart funding for the Farmer Input Support Programme to do so.
Mr Shawa told the Daily Nation in an interview, that some farmers attributed their delayed payment of the FISP counterpart funding to the delayed payment for the maize FRA bought from them. He said “K171m has been released by the Ministry of Finance to the Food Reserve Agency (FRA) and of the total amount released K130m will be used to clear farmers the agency got maize from.”
Mr Shawa said the money will be able to cater for the 65, 000 farmers the FRA bought maize from, adding that this meant there were some farmers that did not sell maize to FRA but claimed they failed to pay their counterpart funding due to the delay.
Mr. Shawa is however hopeful that the farmers will be able to pay the K400 counterpart funding for the support programme to their financial institutions before the exercise closes on January 19, 2018.
Delayed payments to farmers by FRA recently angered farmers who expressed displeasure over the delay by the agency in paying them for the maize they supplied.
The farmers appealed to the Zambia National Farmers Union to engage the government so that FRA could speed up the payment process.