A forum on agriculture financing has been held in Accra, to discuss potential strategies to ensure the sustainability of agriculture in the country.
The programme was attended by officials from the Parliamentary Select Committee on Agriculture, the Ministry of Food and Agriculture (MoFA), Ministry of Finance (Budget Division), the civil society and women networks, amongst other major stakeholders in the agriculture sector.
Speaking at the event, themed: “Financing for Agriculture”, the chairman of the Parliamentary Select Committee on Agriculture, Kwame Asafu-Adjei said that, government was poised on revamping the agriculture sector to create more jobs.
He advised the youth to get actively involved in the sector, since it was the backbone of the economy.
“Agriculture is a priceless commodity, stop focusing on gold and other minerals because they are capital intensive and rather develop interest in making money through agriculture. We are ready to support you in that area,” he advised.
He further indicated that, government will amongst other strategies, focus vigorously on using the “Planting for Food and Jobs” initiative to alleviate poverty in the country.
The Planting for Food and Jobs programme is an initiative, expected to create more than 750,000 jobs and increase the production of maize by 30 per cent, rice by 49 per cent, soybean by 25 per cent and sorghum by 28 per cent from current production levels.
Touching on the Northern Ghana Governance Activity (NGGA) project aimed at ensuring responsive governance for improved agriculture development in Ghana, Michael Alandu, a representative of Care Ghana, was hopeful that measures implemented to grow the agriculture sector would yield positive results.
He said the NGGA would, amongst others, increase the capacity of Ghana’s decentralised agricultural structures at the regional and district levels, improve accountability and strengthen civil society’s demand for better service delivery in agriculture.
“The project, also proposes to enable government and civil society to more effectively mitigate conflict related to agriculture and natural resources management. It covers 28 target ministries, departments and agencies in the three northern regions of the country,” he explained.
In his presentation, Gregory Titigah, Advocacy Coordinator of the NGGA project called on government to ensure the one district one factory policy focused on agro-industries due to their employment and income generation potential.
He also advised government against resorting to the Annual Budget Funding Amount as a substitute for funding capital expenditure of the MoFA.
Inadequate extension services to women and smallholder farmers, he said, had also been a bottleneck in achieving food security in Ghana.
