The government through MoFA has introduced a new electronic coding and traceability technique in a bid to monitor government’s fertiliser subsidy programme and farming inputs.
The new service requires that every farmer who wants to benefit from the subsidy has to be biometrically registered, and only farmers who have already registered can have access to purchase the fertiliser.
Before any purchase is made, an agent at the retail shop will take the farmer’s fingerprint and match it with the code on the bag of fertiliser.
The code identifies region, district zone, fertiliser type, source, distributor and details of the retailer. It will be able to track all fertiliser bags and inputs from supplier all the way to end-user – which is the farmer.
The new technology is expected to eliminate fertiliser smuggling in the country, as subsidised fertilisers will now have a special code – like the tax stamp introduced by the Ghana Revenue Authority.
This traceability technique is the most affordable off-net and real-time technology to improve the service and deliver a value for money platform. Retailers will be given a set of scannable codes to label their inputs based on quantity of allocation.
This new, highly-efficient and traceable fertiliser subsidy management system is to ensure that farmers who have registered biometrically benefit from the fertiliser subsidy by government.
MoFA in conjunction with NABCO is deploying about 2,600 agents to all fertiliser retail shops in the country to register farmers biometrically.
Source: BestNewsGH.com
