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‘Fisp, a burden to Malawi youth’

 

A subsidy fertilizer beneficiary
A subsidy fertilizer beneficiary

The Sustainable Rural Growth and Initiative, a local non-governmental organisation (NGO), has added its voice to calls for an exit strategy of the Farm Input Subsidy Programme (Fisp.

The grouping has described the K60.1 billion Fisp allocation in 2013/14 budget as a future burden on the country’s youth who will have to repay in future.

The observation comes almost a week after Secretary to the Treasury Randson Mwadiwa called for a rethink of the programme for Malawians to start footing costs of what they deserve.

Director of the NGO, Maynad Nyirenda, told the Malawi News Agency (Mana) that the programme which for some years has been regarded as the country’s backbone to food security, the initiative is against principles of sustainable development which demand the use of conservative means of running initiatives.

“The huge investments being channelled towards the programme are mostly loans that the youth of today will have to bear in the future, a thing I feel is unfair to the country’s siblings who deserve a better tomorrow,” he said.

Nyirenda said the use of inorganic fertilisers which the programme is connotatively encouraging has left the country’s soils infertile, a thing he argued is at the expense of young people who will struggle to restore its usefulness.

He noted that most of the fertiliser nutrients being applied upland is, in most cases, swept into the country’s water bodies and is leading to the depletion of fish species including those in Lake Malawi.

Nyirenda said though Fisp has helped the country achieve household food security in recent years, the government keeps injecting resources that are only aggravating national debt with nothing in return.

“If we are to see our country develop a sustainable economy then we should work towards reducing external debt. Continued implementation of the initiative is not helping our farmers to transform to sustainable means of farming,” said Nyirenda, advising the youth to stand-up for their future.

He asked the youth who, he said, hold the country’s future in their hands to join the bandwagon lobbying for Fisp exit strategy if the country’s soil fertility is to be restored.

Mwadiwa told journalists in Lilongwe recently that if Malawi is to develop, it needs to move away from subsidising subsistence farming and look into commercial production if the nation is to produce more for both domestic and export market.

Fisp, introduced by former president late Bingu wa Mutharika in 2005 as a food security initiative, made headlines during the 2013/14 National Budget deliberations as opposition parliamentarians expressed reservations on the programme’s allocation of K60.1 billion.

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