Ministry of Food and Agriculture has introduced a new system in a bid to monitor the fertilizer subsidy programme and farming inputs given to farmers.
The latest development requires every farmer who wants to benefit from the subsidy to be biometrically registered, but farmers who have already registered can purchase the fertilizer.
Before any purchase is made an agent at the retail shop would take the fingerprint of the farmer and match it with the code on the bag of the fertilizer.
The code identifies the region, district, fertilizer type, source, distributor and details of the retailer.
The electronic system will be able to track all fertilizer bags and inputs from suppliers all the way to end user which is the farmer.
The new technology is expected to eliminate fertilizer smuggling in the country.
The system will ensure that subsidized fertilizers would now have a special code like the tax stamp introduced by the Ghana Revenue Authority (GRA).
This traceability technique is the most affordable off-net and real-time technology that is expected to improve the service and deliver value for money.
Retailers will be given a set of scannable codes to label their inputs based on the quantity of allocation.
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This new, highly-efficiency and traceable fertilizer subsidy management system is to ensure that farmers who have registered biometrically benefit from the fertilizer subsidy programme by the government.
Ministry of Food and Agriculture is currently deploying about 2600 agents to all fertilizer retail shops in the country to register farmers biometrically.
The effective input distribution was achieved through the electronic biometric registration which has currently registered over 500,000 farmers throughout the country.
