The General Agricultural Workers Union (GAWU) wants the government to cancel the Planting for Food and Jobs Programme Phase 2 (PFJ2), describing it as a wasteful expenditure.
The Union explained that the policy, since its launch in August 2023, has been bedevilled with numerous challenges affecting its smooth implementation, including a lack of transparency and accountability.
The Planting for Food and Jobs programme Phase 2 was launched in August 2023 to enable farmers to take farm inputs on credit from sellers and pay after harvest. This is a significant difference from the initial programme launched in 2017, where there is a substitution of direct input subsidy with a smart agricultural financial support system in the form of a zero-interest input credit system, where payment would be in-kind.
The launch followed the commencement of registration of farmers on March 12 this year which is to be held across all 16 regions and 261 districts of the country with the aid of Agricultural Extension Agents and other technical persons who had been trained to guide in the registration process using a digital platform.
However, this process stakeholders reveal, has been hindered with challenges, particularly lack of access to tablets to facilitate the exercise coupled with network challenges.
GAWU therefore believes the policy should be cancelled due to lack of transparency and accountability.
“I am saying that I can see that it is also creating waste because it is not transparent. It is not accountable. So, anything that is not transparent in Ghana and people, the public officials are not ready to come out and explain to the people what it is, then it means they are hiding something and embedded in that silence is the waste.”
“So, we are no longer new to things of this nature. So why not it should be cancelled,” General Secretary of GAWU, Edward Kareweh noted in a Citi News on Wednesday.
Meanwhile, the Public Relations Officer for the Ministry of Food and Agriculture (MoFA), Bagbara Tanko denied assertions that the PFJ2 was skewed with several inconsistencies that do not favour farmers.
“We have what we call aggregators. We assign aggregators to these farmers. There’s no way we can by-pass that system under the PFJ2.0. If it is the case, they are saying the selection process is going to be biased, then I beg to differ,” he stated.
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