According to the Agricultural Economist, creating deliberate linkages between the Planting for Food and Jobs programme and livestock production is key.
“Such a link does not come automatically but must be deliberately created and nurtured. The policy does not have such deliberate linkages and that’s why while the Minister for Agriculture is saying that the programme has resulted in a bumper harvest, poultry producers are also crying that maize is not only scarce but expensive on the market.
If we’ve had a bumper harvest of maize, how come the price of the crop is going up instead of coming down,” he lamented. Mr. Kareweh insists market forces are largely accounting for this disparity and only targeted policies could address the situation. “It is all about demand and supply. In Ghana, we don’t have stable prices.
But such developments can be controlled with policy.” he said. He adds that such linkages when properly established would not only create a ready market for the crop farmers but also boost production in the other subsectors and ultimately help address some of the major constraints of agricultural production in Ghana.
“We must ensure that once we increase production, a part of it is deliberately allocated to other sub-sectors. For instance we should link the programme with the poultry industry so that they can tell the farmers what type and quantity of maize should be produced to prevent over production whereby it would go waste to affect the fortunes of the farmers,” he disclosed. “One of the major challenges with the agricultural sector is that, it’s difficult to predict the market; you don’t know who is producing what.
So we need to reorganize the agricultural sector in such a way that we can have data to say how much will be coming from which particular ecological zone and so on. We can then ascertain which market we are sending that produce. Because, remember agricultural produce are bulky and perishable so the market must be close to the producer in order to reduce post-harvest losses which has been another bane of the sector’s growth as up to 35%, in some cases 60%, of produce go waste,” he said.
The General Secretary of GAWU however insists though welcoming, the Planting for Food and Jobs programme is not necessarily the panacea for the agricultural sector’s woes – adding that its sustainability too will depend on a number of factors. “Sustainability will come in a number of ways.
If government’s commitment to provide resources and on time continues into the future, then that part of sustainability is guaranteed. Beyond that, government will have to also look for other funding sources as the project expands.
For example, last year the project was only targeting 200,000 farmers and in 2018 it’s targeting 500,000 farmers and that means resource allocation will have to be more than double. So government will have to find other funding avenues to create that sustainability,” he advised.
