Good afternoon. Fears are growing that Sustenta, the government’s main support programme for small-scale farmers, is to be abolished under new agriculture minister Roberto Albino. Albino declined to comment on the subject when asked about Sustenta by journalists recently, which was strange enough; moreover, he told parliament that it was not the role of the government to provide seeds or tractors to farmers. Under Sustenta, the government has been doing exactly that, providing selected farmers with vehicles, tools, seeds and fertiliser in exchange for them supporting groups of neighbouring peasant farmers.
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Albino, however, has said that farmers should get their seeds from the so-called “agrodealers” that sell agricultural inputs, rather than from the state. To do this, they would certainly need to borrow money from the agrodealers, in a similar way to how cotton or sugar farmers are financed by commodity traders. He also told parliament that the government had not renewed the contracts of the state-funded extension workers: essentially technicians, some 2,000 in number, who have been providing advice to farmers on using improved techniques to increase their yields. Albino suggested that they should be working in farming. This is an important source of expertise which will now be lost; few farmers could afford to hire them at their own expense.