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, to pronounce a damning verdict on the scheme, stressing that they gained nothing from it last year.

But the Federal Government attributed the not too impressive performance of the scheme to the Smallholder farmers themselves.

GESS is a Federal Government’s programme that aims at providing subsidised agricultural inputs, especially fertilisers and seeds to smallholder farmers through a voucher system. It was 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 Participants, were drawn from rural communities across the state.

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 benefited 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.