By John Zodzi
LOME, May 8 (Reuters) - Togo will release 7,000 tonnes of maize onto the market at almost half the market rate to help consumers struggling with high prices, and subsidise fertiliser for farmers, state officials said on Thursday.
Colonel Ouro-Koura Agadaz, head of the Togolese Food Security Observatory said the maize would be sold at 400 CFA francs ($0.936) a bowl, or 16,000 CFA francs per 100 kg sack, almost half the current rate of 700-800 CFA per bowl. Unpredictable weather patterns, rising Asian consumption, demand for land and crops for biofuels, and speculation have forced up world grain prices in recent months, hurting poor African families who already spend most of their income on food.
Purchases will be limited to one 50 kg or 100 kg sack per person, Agadaz said. He could not give any overall figures for national maize consumption in Togo, a small West African nation of less than 6 million people.
Global price pressures could be exacerbated in Togo due to late rains this year, meaning many farmers have only begun sowing their crops in the past week, a month later than usual.
That will mean the harvest, which often starts in late June, will be late, extending the lean season when prices go up.
"We are not far off the 1,100 CFA francs for a bowl of maize which we saw last year," said Agoe To, who sells cereals at the large Hedzranawoe market in Togo's capital Lome.
FERTILISER SUBSIDY
In another move to ease pressure on prices, the government said it would subsidise fertilisers for farmers growing food during the 2008-09 season, slashing the price of fertiliser to 240 CFA francs per kg from 335 francs.
Surging fertiliser costs have been a factor in rising food prices, and have hit marginal and subsistence farmers particularly hard in developing countries.
"As global fertiliser prices have doubled over the last year or so, in parts of Africa they have reached triple or quadruple the levels that we saw even a year ago," said Dennis Garrity, director general of the World Agroforestry Centre in Nairobi.
"This means the already low use of fertilisers by farmers in Africa is set to decline further, and perhaps catastrophically," Garrity said in a teleconference with journalists on Thursday.
African farmers use less than 10 percent of the fertiliser employed by their counterparts in Asia and northern countries, he said, meaning soils were degrading very rapidly and could not benefit from the latest, improved types of food crops. (For full Reuters Africa coverage and to have your say on the top issues, visit: http://africa.reuters.com) (Additional reporting by Daniel Wallis in Nairobi; writing by Alistair Thomson, Editing by Peter Blackburn)
