Dept to allocate fund through commodities

THE Department of National Planning and Monitoring is allocating funding through commodity agencies to develop the agriculture industry to avoid funds being squandered by paper farmers, Minister Richard Maru says.
“Our funding at the moment goes to most of the key commodity agencies like the cocoa board, coffee, spice board, they all have allocations in the budget and also the Department of Agriculture,” he said.
He said one lesson that the Planning Department had learnt was that more than K400 million in national agriculture development programme funding was squandered when given directly to farmers who had nothing to show forth from the funds.
“So we give funds to the bank for those who want to apply for commercial loans to go and build their plantations and develop agriculture projects,” he said.
“We also have the state equity fund for the state to take up equity and we fund each of the commodity boards, we provide them budget funding every year. We also have programmes like the productive partnership in agriculture project (PAPP) that we support the private sector through an ADB (Asian Development Bank) loan.” Maru said every MP got K1m through the district services improvement programme out of the K10 million to provide to farmers and others they wanted to help in their districts.
“So the members do get funds, K1 million every year, to support small to medium enterprises and over five years K5 million to support growth in your electorates,” he said.
“I don’t believe in giving handouts to paper farmers in squandering national wealth.
“I think we need to move away from just giving money to individuals and paper farmers, we must give it to farmers through structured process, that’s why we use the cocoa board and the other commodity boards to do it,” Maru said.
Maru gave an example of the funding allocated to the cocoa board to start regional nursery programmes.
“They’ve done the Mamose region to be completed by November followed by the southern region and another one for the Highlands region,” he said.
“That’s how we fund various commodity agencies to implement various programmes in their sectors.”