Rearing For Food And Jobs Will Help Reduce The Importation Of Meat And Fish -ALEX FORDJOUR

The President’s initiative, “Rearing for Food and Jobs (RFJ)”, is to increase livestock production, especially poultry. Mr Ofori-Atta, who disclosed this in Accra yesterday when he presented the 2019 budget statement and economic policy of government to Parliament, said the move was to reduce the country’s food and poultry import.

This year’s budget statement, the third and first post International Monetary Fund budget under the President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo administration, is on the theme “A Stronger Economy for Jobs and Prosperity.”

The Minister of Finance explained that the country spends more than $2 billion on food import, which was a serious financial drain on the economy, stressing that “we believe we can leverage the PFJ and the RFJ programmes and our other efforts in agriculture to reduce our large food imports.”

“For example, we import over a billion dollars of rice, $320 million of sugar, and $374 million of poultry. Most of these we could produce here; creating jobs and saving for foreign exchange. It is therefore a key goal of government to replace significant fraction of these imports with domestic production in the medium term,” he said.

In the case of poultry, the Minister of Finance indicated about 70 per cent of cost of production was due to feed and the Ministry of Food and Agriculture was working on a project to increase soybean production.
Meanwhile, Cocoa Extension Officer Mr Alex Fordjour has express joy about the introduction of rearing for food and job in country .

He stated that, the rearing for food will really help to reduce the importation of meat and fish into the country. According to him, government has set up areas for Ghanaians to get abundance of meat so he added rearing for food and job so consist of pigs, chicken, goat, sheep etc to create jobs for the people of Ghana.

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