e-finance, a company that specialises in operating financial facilities, began implementing the system to automate documents of the agriculture holdings. The project is carried out in cooperation with ministries of military production, agriculture, and land reclamation, planning, monitoring and administrative reform, and communications and information technology.
The system of automating the agricultural holdings documents aims to provide an accurate national database including all the agricultural holdings nationwide and inventories of planted areas and their crops in the different agricultural seasons. The goal is to set and implement the state’s agricultural policies, as well as to provide subsidies to seven million farmers whether in the form of fertilisers or petroleum substances and to control these subsidies through smart cards used for the subsidies system.
Minister of Planning, Monitoring and Administrative Reform Ashraf El-Araby said that the cost of the first phase of the project that includes seven million agricultural holdings, amounts to EGP 357m and will be implemented over three years.
Chairperson of e-finance Ibrahim Sarhan said that implementing the system will reduce violations against agricultural lands and the execution of the state’s agricultural policies, and will develop a way of monitoring the different administrative levels in the Ministry of Agriculture.
Sarhan explained that the system will be carried out in two phases. The first includes automating the documents of seven million agricultural holdings nationwide. It also includes distributing computer devices to the Ministry of Agriculture and all its affiliated bodies nationwide to enter and edit the data of the planted lands in every agricultural season.
Moreover, it includes providing the needed communication means for the system to link the Ministry of Agriculture and its affiliated bodies to the project’s major centre responsible for managing the collected data. Furthermore, the first phase includes printing and distributing seven million smart cards for the owners of agricultural lands nationwide, distributing the subsidies on the farmers in accordance with the policy decided by the state, and providing services of training, maintenance, and technical support for all the system’s users.
As for the second phase, it includes distributing tablet devices on the bodies affiliated to the Ministry of Agriculture that are responsible for entering and editing the data of the agriculture lands in each season in addition to training all the system’s users in these bodies.
He added that an experimental project to implement the system has already begun in Ismailia. The data of 29,500 agricultural holdings were added to the database. In addition, smart cards were printed and delivered to the Ministry of Agriculture.
