Why agriculture needs more than just fertiliser subsidies

Workers offload fertiliser from a truck to a godown at the National Cereals and Produce Board, Eldoret depot. FILE PHOTO | NMG

Subsidies are often misconstrued to mean reduced costs. But the truth is that subsidies increase the cost of items in the end through long bureaucratic processes needed to administer them.

Subsidies, therefore, do not lower the cost of goods since the reduced prices are paid through government coffers, taxes, or by foregoing services that could have been in the first place paid for by resources used in the subsidy program.

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Note: The results are not exact but very close to the actual.