More than 200 farmers in Chavuma and Zambezi districts have not been paid for sale of rice to FRA.
Zambezi District Agricultural Coordinator-DACO Lewis Chiwele and Chavuma District Farmers Association marketing manager Sylvia Mukwato confirmed this to National Agriculture Information Services-NAIS when the crew visited the districts during a tour of crop storage inspection yesterday.
The duo told NAIS that FRA purchased rice from more than 200 farmers in the west bank of Chavuma and Zambezi districts worthy more than 500 million kwacha of which farmers have not been paid since August 2011.
The non payment of Farmers for sale of their products by FRA has made it difficult for them to buy inputs for this farming season.
In an interview with one of the affected rice farmers from Nyatanda satellite depot of Chavuma district Chamuzumba Geofrey said that the situation had put them in an awkward situation as they could not access the inputs from the Farmer Input Support programme-FISP.
Mr. Chamuzumba has so far appealed to the government to expedient the process of payments for farmers to enable them buy inputs since farming activities were almost getting out of season.
In the same vein, more than 15 thousand by 40kg bags of rice purchased by FRA from farmers in Chavuma and Zambezi districts are marooned in the west banks and not collected.
The marooned bags of rice have been accumulative purchases for three consecutive marketing seasons from 2008/2009 through 2010/2011.
In an interview with Chavuma DACO Chimpipa Habeenzo said that the rice marooned in the west bank risked getting to waste if urgent action to move the crop was not taken by FRA.
ZANIS
FRA is a fraud. Can you plz pay those hard working farmers the little money they are waiting for so they can regrow the crop again and feed its people. This is riduculous! Do you need everybody to be in lusaka or politics to make money. Cheap id–io–ts in high office making decisions.
#1, nice one. These fools don’t realise the importance of farming, particularly here in Zambia. Zambia is supposed to rely on itself when it comes to such, but because of stupid idi0ts like FRA, farming is being discouraged.