Board Chairman of the Ghana Cocoa Board, Hackman Owusu-Agyeman, has revealed why the free fertiliser supply for farmers was suspended.
According to him, the outfit did not have enough money to get the fertilisers and give out to all farmers for free.
Mr Owusu-Agyeman disclosed this in an interview on Joy News.
“We realised we didn’t have enough money to get fertilisers for everybody for free so what we did was for the farmers to pay 50 % while we also bear the 50% cost,” he said.
He added the misuse and abuse of the policy also accounted for the suspension.
“What I have come to realise is that when you give people things for free, they misuse it, smuggle and all.
“So even as a politician, I never gave out things for free not even my T-shirt, if it was GHS5, I made sure the people paid at least GHS1 for them to value it since they have also contributed,” he noted.
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The erstwhile Mahama administration supplied cocoa farmers with free fertiliser to help boost their crops and, by extension, the cocoa sector.
Over 1.6 million bags of inorganic fertiliser, 220,000 bags of organic fertiliser and 1.7 million litres of foliar fertiliser were distributed for free in 2014.
However, the incumbent government re-introduced a long-standing policy of subsidies on fertiliser, which replaced the Mahama-led administration’s free cocoa fertiliser distribution scheme.
Listen to Mr Owusu-Agyeman in the video attached above: