Smallholder farmers in Kwara State have made their position clear on the impact of the Growth Enhancement Support Scheme (GESS), saying it has been of little help.

The farmers including women met in Ilorin, the state capital, to pronounce a damning verdict on the scheme, stressing that they gained nothing from it last year. But the federal government attributed the not to impressive performance of the scheme on the Smallholder farmers themselves.

GESS is a federal government's programme that aims to provide subsidised agricultural inputs especially fertilisers and seeds to smallholder farmers through a voucher system. It was also designed by the former President Goodluck Jonathan's administration to ensure that subsidised fertiliser and seeds get to actual farmers, rather than providing a general subsidy to all farmers. The assessment of the GESS performance is contained in a score-card CCEPE presented to the stakeholders in Ilorin.

The score-card is dubbed "Dissemination of Community Participatory Assessment on Government Expenditure on Agriculture and Score-Card on Growth Enhancement Support Scheme (GESS) 2014". The programme was convened by the Centre for Community Empowerment and Poverty Eradication (CCEPE) and supported by the Actionaid Nigeria

The report noted that the GESS programme did not improve for 2014 in Kwara as much as it did in 2013 unlike in Bauchi and the Federal Capital Territory, where there was a significant improvement in the year under review.

"However, some states like Kwara, Delta and Ondo made significant improvement on the number of farmers that benefitted from the programme in 2014.

"In spite of these individual state's improvement, the programme is still plagued with several challenges, most of which were identified in the 2013 assessment.

"For instance, farmers still experienced acute delay in inputs delivery, far redemption centres, and difficulty collecting inputs at redemption centres. "All persisting as a challenge is the poor phone networks and low farmers' ownership of telephone handsets", the score-card said.

The Programme Officer of CCEPE, Mr Abdulrahaman Ayuba, who presented the report explained that the real smallholder farmers were still left out of the scheme as many of them complained of registering, but not redeeming their input and the inconsistency in input redemption from year to year.

Ayuba said that the NGO, which engaged a consultant to assess the performance of the scheme, discovered that its performance dropped in Kwara from average in 2013 to poor in 2014.

He added, though that the scheme improved in states like Bauchi and the Federal Capital Territory, where the Actionaid Nigeria carried out a similar research when the 2014 performance was compared with that of 2013.

Ayuba added that "generally, among the eight states the scheme performed averagely with 2.63 points, which could be because five of the eight states scored average points.

"Compared to 2013 performance, the overall performance of 2014 GESS was not better than the 2013, because they rated the scheme average in both years. Only Bauchi state improved its performance from average (3.15 points) to good (3.45 points). The remaining states either maintained their performance or dropped in their performance.

"At the commencement of the programme in 2012, 1.7 million farmers were reached with fertilizer and seeds, which means, it fell short of its target by 3.3 million farmers. By implication, the scheme performed woefully in its first year. In 2013, the programme redeemed 5.9 million farmers, cumulatively, a remarkable improvement from 2012.

"What this suggests is that 4.1 million were the actual addition in the 2013 farming season. Again, the progamme could not meet five million farmers targeted. In 2014, the scheme also redeemed seven million; meaning only two million farmers were added. This implies that the annual number of farmers redeemed dropped geometrically.

"Instead of having a total of 15 million farmers benefiting from the programme, only seven million farmers were doing so. Less than half of the projected number of farmers benefited from the programme in 2014. And there is no guarantee that farmers that benefited in the previous year will do so in any current year."

The report therefore, advocated for a review and continuation of the GESS programme to serve as a pro-active measure considering the danger of it being discontinued by the new regime. "All stakeholders advocate for an act on GESS to guarantee sustainability of the programme and the financial commitment of the state and local governments.

"Improve the delivery time of inputs by improving on settlements with agro-dealers, which in turn should improve loan repayments and transactions for input supplies", it said.

Other recommendations of the report include a detail study on redemption process with the aim of better understanding why farmers are saying they are not redeeming their inputs; further increase in the redemption centres so as to bring the inputs closer to the farmers; involvement of traditional rulers in warehousing the inputs to improve accessibility; involvement of farmers and agro-dealers in decision affecting them and integration of the department of agriculture of the local governments in the process.

The report also recommended that the department of agriculture of the local government be integrated in the process to improve farmers' registration and continually generate needed data on the performance among others. In his response, Kwara State Acting Director, Federal Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development, Mr. Raphael Adeponle advised farmers to see agriculture as a business.

He noted that farmers see whatever that is given to support them as largesse and did not bother to pay back credit facility they accessed. Adeponle said he had noted all the observations raised in the score-card, promising to channel them to the appropriate quarters.