KATHMANDU, JUNE 13
The House of Representatives today unanimously passed a special motion directing the government to provide fertilisers to farmers at the earliest.
Speaker Agni Prasad Sapkota also drew the attention of the government towards acute shortage of chemical fertilisers across the country.
The Lower House of the Parliament passed the special motion after 48 lawmakers took part in the debate on shortage of fertilisers in the country.
The House debated the fertiliser shortage issue postponing budgetary discussion after UML lawmakers registered a motion of urgent importance demanding postponement of budgetary discussion in order to discuss the urgent issue of fertiliser shortage.
UML lawmaker Narayan Prasad Khatiwada said a woman from his municipality in Nuwakot told him that she paid Rs 2,700 for one sack of fertiliser which cost only Rs 900 earlier.
He said the government would not be able to reduce import and increase export of agro products without providing required amount of fertilisers to farmers.
He said the government should establish a fertiliser factory in the country to find a long-term solution to fertiliser shortage and for an urgent solution, the government needed to enter into government-to-government agreement with fertiliser supplier companies.
CPN (US) lawmaker Jeevan Ram Shrestha said the country lacked facilities to store fertilisers even for six months. He said the government needed to establish a fertiliser factory to find a long-term solution to the shortage.
Democratic Socialist Party-Nepal lawmaker Uma Shankar Argariya said it was bizarre that 60 per cent population depended on agriculture, but farmers were not getting fertilisers on time.
Nepali Congress lawmaker Dila Sangraula said the motion related to shortage of fertilisers was important, but the issue raised in the motion was of equal concern to all MPs and should not be seen as the one dividing ruling and opposition parties. She said the government should provide fertilisers to farmers through a government-to-government agreement with India.
Earlier, Minister of Agriculture and Livestock Development Mahendra Ray Yadav responded to lawmakers' concerns saying that the Ukraine-Russia war and global instability in prices were major reasons behind the government's failure to ensure supply of fertilisers.
Yadav said Krishi Samagri Company Ltd and Salt Trading Corporation Ltd were in the process of procuring 105,000 metric tonnes and 117,000 metric tonnes of fertilisers, respectively.
He said he scrapped the contract of the contractors who had failed to supply fertilisers on time.
Stating that Nepal needed 10 lakh metric tonnes of fertilisers each year and the best option would be to establish a fertiliser factory in the country. He said the government-to-government route must be explored to address fertiliser shortage as seeking supply of fertiliser by opening a tender was too lengthy. "The tender route takes 226 days for the supplier to supply fertilisers to government warehouse," Yadav said and added that fertiliser market was always unstable.
UML lawmaker Khagaraj Adhikari said Yadav only expressed the possibility of supplying fertilisers, but there was dire need of fertilisers at the moment.
The govt should establish a fertiliser factory to find a long-term solution to fertiliser shortage.
A version of this article appears in the print on June 14, 2022, of The Himalayan Times.
