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Agribusiness opportunities await harnessing – report

The 15-chapter report covers a wide range of sectors, including manufacturing, agribusiness, mining, energy, financial services and pensions, advertising and oil and gas.

Others sectors are information and communications technology, health and pharmaceuticals, hospitality and tourism.

For instance, on agribusiness, the publication emphasised the numerous opportunities that exist in the sector for which reason platforms and structures needed to be created, with interventions to attract entrepreneurs into the sector.

The Vice Chancellor of the University of Ghana, Professor Ernest Aryeetey, launched the report and lauded the Business School for working hard to deepen the knowledge base and veritable information on business development.

The Dean of the University of Ghana Business School, Prof. Joshua Yindenaba Abor, said the publication was to fill a gap that existed when it came to information and statistics on the firm level.

The UGBS, which earlier in the year came out with a publication on the capital market, would be publishing more such reports, going forward, as it steps out to become a research intensive world class university.

“For world-class and research intensive university, one of the things you look out for is coming out with policy relevant research; findings that will inform policy making. As a school, we have the state of the Ghanaian Economy report at the macro level, but we thought there are issues, especially at the micro level and that is the gap the Business School comes to fill,” Prof. Abor explained.

 Industry, academia collaboration

The University of Ghana Business School has now changed its methods of teaching courses, having included experiential learning modules where students are grouped to solve problems in society using the academic knowledge.

Likewise, in the publication, the school received a slot of sponsorship support from the private sector. They include FirstBanc Financial Services Ltd and the Kama Group Ltd. There were also international donors such as the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), the Danish International Development Agency (DANIDA), the Business Sector Advocacy Challenge (BUSAC) Fund, the European Union (EU), as well as the Centre for Sustainability and Enterprise Development.

 Focus on agribusiness

For this edition, the GRAPHIC BUSINESS will focus on chapter four, which deals with Agribusiness.

This is because agribusiness is very important in the scheme of the Ghanaian economy, given that agriculture constitutes 19 per cent of total domestic productivity – Gross Domestic Product (GDP).

The population involved in agricultural was 13,366,340 and accounted for 54.2 per cent of the total population, according to the 2010 Population and Housing Census. That report indicated that out of a total of 5,467,136 households in the country, 2,503,006 households were found to have individuals involved in agriculture, translating to 45.8 per cent of the total households in the country.

Rural areas accounted for 73.5 per cent of the agricultural households, demonstrating that agriculture is a concentrated sector. Since poverty is endemic in rural areas, the focus on commercially viable agriculture is a promising way to eradicate poverty.

Why low performance of agric

Last year, the agriculture sector grew at 0.04 per cent at the close of last year. Agriculture is done mainly on subsistence basis in Ghana, as about 90 per cent of farmers cultivate a size of two hectares. Since they still apply traditional methods of hoe and cutlass, performance of the sector has been abysmal, although governments have made interventions to boost productivity.

The GBDR points that another reason that could account for the low performance of the sector is the reliance on rainfall, instead of building irrigation systems. The review posits that irrigation farming in the country only amounts to five per cent of the total 500,000 hectare potential.

What agribusiness entails

It, therefore, defines agribusiness as the business of agriculture which it sees as probably one of the new and emerging areas of attention and focus in terms of contemporary policy formulation for most developing countries, including Ghana.

“Agribusiness industry is composed of a complex series of firms. These firms supply inputs to farms, produce farm products, process agricultural products and market these commodities to the final consumer,” it said.

However, the authors believe that although there have been some growth associated with that environment, “the industry in Ghana is still in its primary stages where there is no pull from the modern, industrial sector and no link between the traditional agricultural sector and the market.”

 Extensive dissection

The report goes on to discuss some of the various interventions in agriculture, including agribusiness, in recent times, cataloguing the public, private sector and collaborative approaches, including donor support.

Some of the discussions bother on operational, information and technological issues, where it believes globalisation offers countries such as Ghana technological solutions such as application of ICT to agriculture or agribusiness.

When it comes to managerial and governance issues, the agricultural sector, and agribusiness in particular, is a far cry of those with perfect governance systems. Most of the operators are informal with unregistered business addresses, which sometimes make it difficult to market their produce to the market.

Source: www.graphic.com.gh

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