In 2020, the government through the former Finance Minister, Ken Ofori-Atta, announced a couple of agricultural initiatives to improve the sector during the presentation of the Budget Statement and Economic Policy in November the previous year.
The 287-paged policy statement was themed “Consolidating the Gains for Growth, Jobs and Prosperity for all”.
Ofori-Atta said that in 2017 when the NPP Government assumed office, growth in the agriculture sector had declined drastically and programmes put in place by the Akufo-Addo government were aimed at turning the situation around for the good.
He added that results from government’s interventions were yielding positive results.
Mr. Ofori-Atta said: “The Government’s agriculture modernisation programme was therefore aimed at improving production efficiency, achieving food security, and profitability for our farmers, and significantly increasing agricultural productivity as the basis for industrialization, job creation and export. Growth in the Agriculture sector moved from a low of 2.9 percent in 2016 to 6.1 percent in 2017, recorded a growth of 4.8 percent in 2018 and is projected to grow at 6.9 percent in 2019.”
Mr. Ofori-Atta also added that the government was going to intensify its support for farmers through its flagship programmes like the Planting for Food and Jobs initiative.
Planting for Food and Jobs
Planting for Food and Jobs is a flagship agricultural campaign of the Akufo-Addo government, with five (5) implementation modules.
The first module PFJ (Crops) aims to promote food security and immediate availability of selected food crops on the market and also provide jobs.
The ultimate aim is also to help reduce the impact of imports on the cedi’s performance as it will reduce the high requirement for dollars for such purposes.
Under the Planting for Food and Jobs, every district or local authority is expected to select a crop that it has a comparative advantage in, where the government will support the cultivation of such crops with fertilizer, improved seeds as well as other improved technology.
According to the government, the implementation of this initiative has been very successful.
The Minister for Agriculture, Dr. Owusu Afriyie Akoto indicated at his vetting that over two million jobs had so far been created under this initiative.
He insisted that, it is the initiative that has enabled the government to create more jobs in the last four years.
According to Dr Owusu Afriyie Akoto, 745,000 people were employed in 2017, 794,944 in 2018 and 746,948 in 2019, a clear improvement in the performance of the agricultural sector in the country as year-on-year food inflation keeps declining.
He revealed that the Global index which considers affordability availability and quality of food across 113 countries placed Ghana in the 59th position in 2019 from the 79th position in 2018.
Rearing For Food And Jobs
The President, Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, launched the Rearing for Food and Jobs (RFJ) campaign, another module of his administration’s flagship programme – “Planting for Food and Jobs”.
The initiative is expected to run for five years, from 2019 to 2023, according to President Akufo-Addo, and it “will develop a competitive and more efficient livestock industry, that will increase domestic production, reduce importation of livestock products, contribute to employment creation, and improve livelihoods of livestock value chain actors”.
President Akufo-Addo who launched the campaign on June 25, 2019, in Wa, in the Upper West Region, bemoaned the steep decline of Ghana’s livestock sector, which has been largely attributed to the high cost of production, and competition from cheap imports of livestock and its products, forcing most livestock producers to stop producing meat and to concentrate solely on crop production.
“In the five-year period of the RFJ campaign, it is projected that forty thousand, five hundred (40,500) small ruminants, mainly sheep and goats, thirty-eight thousand (38,000) pigs, two hundred and fifty-eight thousand (258,000) cockerels, and over six hundred and sixty thousand (660,000) guinea fowls, which will not fly to Burkina Faso, will be distributed to livestock farmers and would-be farmers, throughout the country,” President Akufo-Addo said.
He continued, “three thousand (3,000) cattle farmers will benefit from a programme of artificial insemination to increase average meat production. These planned interventions are indicative of the important attention now being given to the livestock sector after years of neglect.”
Food Security
The President, Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo during the 2021 state of the nation address spoke highly of the Planting for Food and Jobs and called for commendation for the Agriculture Minister.
According to him, due to the programmes like Planting for Food and Jobs, there was no shortage of food during the pandemic.
“I’m happy to announce to the country that during the [COVID-19] pandemic, we have not experienced any food shortages.
There have been increases in maize and rice yields by 110% and 48% respectively and we have, for the first term in a long while, become a net exporter of food as against the days of the importation of tomatoes and plantain.”
Views of analysts
Seeking views of sector players, most of them gave commendations to the government.
They maintain the sector has seen major improvement since 2017.
Mr. Edward Kareweh, the General Secretary of the Ghana Agricultural Workers Union commended the government for some achievements in the sector.
He argued that the government was doing well in the sector until the Coronavirus outbreak.
“Programmes like the planting for food and job, the rearing for food and jobs and the warehouses that this government has embarked on shows bright prospects for the sector and it (government) must be commended for it. We can only hope that the yet to be read budget will give more attention to other issues and help the sector grow better to feed the nation.”
Also, the President of the Greater Accra Farmers Association, Mr. Michael Nyarko-Ampem in a Citi News interview explained that most of the government’s promises in the 2020 budget for his industry insisted due to the COVID-19 outbreak, most of them were not done.
According to him, there were more pressing issues the government needed to focus its attention on.
“The promise to procure 70 small chicken processing units for medium-scale poultry farmers in 35 districts was not achieved in the light of the pandemic because there were other more pressing issues. So it wasn’t going to be feasible and we understood the situation since we were also affected.”
Mr. Nyarko-Ampem added that he expects life to return to normalcy and businesses picking up.
Meanwhile, speaking on their expectation for the yet-to-read budget tomorrow (Friday, March 12, 2021), the association called on the government to tackle all issues facing the sector to enable growth in the sector.
“…Not directly but we have had an informal discussion with the minister, and we believe that he will speak to the Finance Ministry. We expect that the broiler revitalization project that the government wanted to do will be done because we believe that with the vaccine rollout, life and communities will come back to normalcy.”