Kumasi, Jan.04, GNA – The government has been asked to prioritize the agricultural sector by strengthening initiatives and practical approaches to boost food production and ensure stable food prices in 2022.
The Ghana Agricultural and Rural Development Journalists Association (GARDJA), which made the call, said the government needed to take practical actions and strategies that would help boost food production to ensure sustainable food security for the people while improving the living conditions of farmers.
These were contained in a statement jointly signed by Mr Richmond Frimpong, President of GARDJA and Mr Joseph Opoku Gakpo, Deputy General Secretary of the Association and copied to Ghana News Agency in Kumasi.
The call was in response to the high cost of some staple food items in the country in the year 2021.
Data from the Statistics, Research, and Information directorate of the Ministry for Food and Agriculture shows that, between January and October 2021, the prices of major food crops like maize, yam, cassava, tomatoes, rice, and yam increased by between 12 per cent and 73 per cent.
This means that it was more difficult for people to buy the foods they needed to stay satisfied and healthy, and it was undoubted that the just ended year, 2021, was a difficult agricultural year.
The contributory factors, according to the Association, included poor management of the sector, and external shocks – delayed release of funds for major policy interventions like the Fertilizer Subsidy Programme, Covid-19 disruptions to the global agricultural supply chain and climate change.
The statement suggested a proper decentralization of the management of Ghana’s agricultural sector.
GARDJA said the decision by the government to make the departments of agriculture across the country more accountable to local assemblies through the local government system instead of them being subsidiaries of the MoFA was laudable.
“But that would mean nothing if conscious efforts are not made to channel resources directly from the central government to these district agricultural department offices to provide quality extension services to farmers, support them with mechanization services as well as subsidized inputs,” it explained.
Again, it suggested that the government used its purchasing power to make life better for smallholder producers.
“It doesn’t make sense that government funded initiatives like the School Feeding Programme, sometimes rely on imported food products.
The local agricultural economy must be propped up with local and national government funding.
There must be a conscious effort by the state at the national and local level to create conducive environments for the marketing of farm produce for the benefit of Ghanaian farmers,” the statement added.
The statement further suggested that the government intervened and properly zoned out farming lands that should be no-go areas for physical infrastructural development.
“It is about time we tackled head on the challenge of inadequate protection of farmlands in the country.
In semi – urban areas, estate developers have vigorously taken over agricultural lands, forcing smallholder producers out of work,” it said.
The statement touching on the impact of climate change urged the government to speed up work on improving the country’s irrigation system and revive the abandoned projects of the failed One-village One-dam Policy.
It explained that as farmers across the country had observed, the policy had created non-existent and useless dams that had not made any difference in their lives.
The concept of providing farmers with irrigation facilities was a good move that must necessarily be pursued to the very latter.
GARDJA is an association of about 300 journalists and communicators working to promote issues of environment, agriculture and rural development in the media space.
The Association is an affiliate of the International Federation of Agricultural Journalists (IFAJ), the world’s largest association of agricultural communication practitioners with membership covering more than 50 countries.
