How a well coordinated agric intervention pays
The country's horticultural sector is making steady progress to regain its former shine as a leading foreign exchange earner for the economy.
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Most of the items in the sector have registered growth over the period since the 1980s. A total of 127,000 tonnes of chillies and green peppers valued at US$127.1 million were produced in 2011, according to the GhanaVeg sector report for 2016. The output marked an increase over the 137,000 tonnes produced in 1986 and 277,000 produced in 2006.
The report put tomatoes production at 340,000 tonnes valued at US$125.65 million in 2011, with the 80,000 okro output earning US$51.16 million in 2011.
The potential of the vegetables subsector has informed the government of The Netherlands to provide support for the Ghana’s horticultural sector to increase production for export and local consumption.
GhanaVeg comes in handy
Known as the GhanaVeg Programme, it aims at increasing the production of quality and healthy vegetables for export. It does this by supporting companies in the vegetables sector with information, contacts and hands-on assistance for them to scale up to rope in smallholder farmers as nucleus farmers.
As part of the support, the GhanaVeg Programme has instituted the GhanaVeg Exhibition, which brings together players in the horticultural value chain.
The second Ghana vegetable exhibition and seminars which opened in Accra between June 14 and 15 brought together players in the subsector to showcase their products and services. The exhibition revealed enormous interventions by various actors to add value to the chain. Most intriguing is the processing and canning of fruits and vegetables to prevent post-harvest losses.
Agro-processing on the rise
One such intervention is by Akimides FarmCare, a small scale enterprise which is bottling fresh cut vegetable and fruits to prolong the shelf life of farm produce. The small and medium enterprise is into canning green pepper, okra, pineapple and ginger, chilly pepper, round pepper, aubergines and other fresh cuts preserved in natural liquids, which the company said was a natural formula which did not contain artificial preservatives.
The founder and Chief Eecutive Officer of Akimidis FarmCare, Mr Prosper Richardson, told the GRAPHIC BUSINESS at the exhibition that the initiative enabled him to assist farmers to cut post-harvest losses, especially during bumper harvests and gluts.
He said the fruits were also sourced from organic farms which agronomic practices were globalGap certified or met international standards.
Mr Richardson, whose group of companies include a farmer-buyer linkage platform ,adopted the processing as a means to assist the farmers to avoid losing value during crop gluts or bumper harvests and help make people's favourite fruits and vegetables available all-year round.
Currently packing about 100 boxes of 24 pieces cans a month through a manual labour intensive process, Akimidis FarmCare is able to prolong the shelf life of fruits and vegetables up to five years, without losing the freshness of the produce.
Interplast into irrigation equipment
The GRAPHIC BUSINESS also came into contact with Interplast Ltd which has set up its agriculture equipment unit. The unit now deals in simple irrigation equipment for drip, sprinkler and surface irrigation.
Assistant Sales Manager for Interplast, Mr Ashish Chahar, told the paper that although the agric support had been operating for only about a year, the interest from the market had been great.
While Interplast, known for its quality PET pipes and products manufactures a greater part of the irrigation piping system in its Ghana plant, it sources the sprinklers and other accessories from its partners companies outside the country.
Farmers in Ghana, coupled with the lack of access to credit, also complain about the high cost of irrigation equipment which denies them the opportunities doing double season cultivation.
But Mr Chahar said “our irrigation systems are affordable. We need to understand that investing in such a system to guarantee and boost yield has an initial cost outlay but the combined long term effect which means better yields for higher profits will always compensate for the initial cost outlay.”
The Interplast agric team plans to go out onto farms to give out some of the irrigation equipment to farmer groups for demonstration.
The exhibition brought together about 35 exhibitors from fruit and vegetable producers, service providers, input suppliers, processors and other stakeholders.
The Dutch support
A representative of The Netherlands Embassy in Ghana, Ms Mariska Lammers, said the embassy selected the vegetables subsector because of its mutual benefits to the two countries.
She said Ghana had a lot of potential in the vegetable subsector which could be harnessed to facilitate trade between Ghana and the EU.
Ms Lammers said the programme had done a lot of work through stakeholders to address the issues that led to the ban, but a lot of work remained to be done, especially at the farm level, involving mainly small-holder farmers.