The Minister of Food and Agriculture, Dr Owusu Afriyie Akoto, has called on all stakeholders in the agriculture sector to support the government’s efforts to secure the country’s economy with agriculture.
He said there was no security for the country’s economy if the agriculture sector was not strong, which was the path that the government wanted to chart .
The minister said this at the GRAPHIC BUSINESS/Stanbic Bank Breakfast Meeting in Accra, which was on the theme ‘Securing the economy with Agriculture’.
“Any effort to grow this economy without the foundation of agriculture is bound to fail and the economic history of this country since independence clearly supports this,” he stated.
He said that informed the government’s determination to chart a new course by turning the fortunes of the sector around for economic transformation.
He noted that all indications showed that the agriculture sector had been inefficient in recent times.
“Agriculture in Ghana has been inefficient even by the standards of our own competitors in Africa and the focus of this government is to turn around agriculture to transform the economy,” he indicated.
Food importation
He also bemoaned the high level of food importation in the country.
“We have been blessed with fertile lands but we are importing food which our farmers grow. Statistics show that in 2007, Ghana spent US$ 345 million importing eight food items which are produced by our farmers here. This figure ballooned to US$2.2 billion by 2015 and out of that US$1.1 billion was from rice,” he noted.
“It’s scary that we spend over a billion dollars to import rice which our farmers grow in Ghana and it is for this reason that the government introduced the Planting for Food and Jobs programme to scale up the production of food crops in the country,” he pointed out.
Link between farmers and technology
Dr Akoto also called for the need to link farmers to available researches and technologies in order to scale up food production.
He said the link between the farmers and the technology had been weakened due to the unavailability of extension officers to transfer the technologies and researches to the farmers.
“I inherited a ministry which had in its books 4,400 extension officers out of which only 2,200 were around. And out of the 2200, 80 per cent of them are going on retirement in the next two to three years,” he explained.
He said one essential part of the planting for food and jobs programme was therefore to recruit more extension officers who will transfer knowledge to small holder farmers, as well as provide them with improved seeds and fertiliser to increase their yields.
Market access
Touching on market access, Dr Akoto said the country needed about 200,000 metric tonnes storage capacity to effectively market its agricultural products.
“As the moment we have just around 32, 000 and we have had to commandeer warehouses from the Ghana Cocoa Board (COCOBOD), which is about 97,00 but this is still not enough,” he stated.
He said the country was still short, hence the decision of the government to launch the one district one warehouse project.
Agric colleges
A former Deputy Minister of Agriculture, Dr Ahmed Alhassan Yakubu, for his part, called on the government to retool the country’s agricultural colleges to generate informed and knowledgeable agricultural extension workers and agribusiness entrepreneurs themselves.
He said the future Ghanaian farmer was not going to sit and wait for extension messages but be a trainable in the management of agribusiness.
He also called for an overhauling of agriculture education and called for a paradigm shift from being trained to be an employee to be an employer.
He said the country had done enough advocacy on the sector and it was now time for action to deliver tangibles.
“There are no point discussing tangibles without acting to deliver those tangibles and that is where I believe that all of us must see the sector going forward in that line,” he said.
Dr Owusu Afriyie Akoto (middle), Minister of Food and Agriculture, Dr Yakubu Alhassan (right), a former Deputy Minister of Food and Agriculture and Dr Abu Forster Sakara, an agriculture expert, interacting after the programme Dr Owusu Afriyie Akoto (middle), Minister of Food and Agriculture, Dr Yakubu Alhassan (right), a former Deputy Minister of Food and Agriculture and Dr Abu Forster Sakara, an agriculture expert, interacting after the programme.
Source: graphiconline.com.gh
