Eldoret,
Saturday April 27, 2024,
KNA by Judy Too and Tuphosa Ngani
The National Assembly departmental committee on Agriculture has assured Farmers in Uasin Gishu county who received substandard fertilizers will be compensated with quality top dressing fertilizer. Addressing the Media at National Cereals Board and produce board depot (NCPB) Eldoret, the committee led by Sabina Chege urged all the farmers to lodge formal complaints for compensation.
“We will have to call out names for the people involved in the scandal whether they are people in government, private sector, manufactures or suppliers and we will find out what happened and where the fake fertilizers came from,” she said.
Chege noted that several samples have been collected and testing will be done and in two weeks’ time a report will be presented at the parliament with recommendations.
She pointed out that with recent complaints about fertilizers the committee wants to interact with farmers and get a genuine view from them if they got fertilizers on time, if they were of good quality and if the compensation is working or not.
“From our preliminary investigation we can tell that there was a first batch that came out and were very good and later on there were companies that supplied farmers with fake fertilizers,” she noted.
The nominated MP noted that some manufacturers licensed to supply might have taken different samples to Kenya Bureau of Standards (KEBS) as compared to the ones received at the cereals board.
NCPB Regional Manager North Rift Gilbert Rotich, noted that they have started the process of distributing top dressing fertilizer and the depot has received around 21,000 for the whole region and they have an acute shortage in terms of what has arrived and they are working on getting more supplies.
He said that the KEL Green fertilizer which has been withdrawn from all NCPB stores had received 24,920 bags and sold 24,488 bags to farmers and 432 remaining are still at the stores.
“On KEL Green fertilizers over 95 percent farmers had already used it and we have started the process of compensating those farmers while those who have not used it are being replaced with other varieties of planting fertilizers.
We have been able to replace about 484 bags for the whole region and we are going to compensate the remaining affected farmers with top dressing fertilizers and currently we have around 3,800 bags of top dressing fertilizers for that purpose,” said Rotich.
Courtesy; KNA
