Media should be agents of change in agric sector
The media has been urged to use its platform to facilitate dialogue on sustainable agricultural practices.
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The West Africa Regional Coordinator of the Centre for Agriculture and Biosciences International (CABI), Dr Victor Attuquaye Clottey, said such dialogues could lead to policy changes that would help revive the dwindling fortunes of the oiling sector.
He said with increasing population across the world, the number of interests competing for the same resources such as water and land space, agriculture must be made sustainable and new ways should be found to make agriculture yield more with the same resources.
At an outcome mapping workshop in Accra for media practitioners on March 22, 2017, he said: “Those days where we had extensive form of agric production where you could leave your land fallow is no more there so we need to do agricultural intensification because we have population explosion and we have to do it sustainably,” he said.
Failure to do so, he said, would result in the region losing the little that it had for production because physically, the value of it was not there and would, therefore, lead to environmental degradation.
Dr Clottey said sound policies and a political platform to discuss how to make it better were needed. That, he said, called for people who had done sound studies into some policies to share with the larger population.
“This is how people learn and it becomes a way of life so we do things in a way that we can manage our resources. We can’t do knowledge management and social learning without the media,” he said.
Outcome Mapping (OM)
The Ghana National Learning Alliance (GH-NLA) under the Sustainable Agricultural Intensification Research and Learning in Africa (SAIRLA) programme organised OM workshop for the media stakeholder group to develop and map out the desired outcomes of the project and set progress markers for monitoring and evaluation.
SAIRLA seeks to enhance the well-being of smallholder agricultural value chain actors, particularly, women and youth.
The facilitator GH-NLA, Dr Naaminong Karbo, explained the SAIRLA), was a five-year programme funded by the Department for International Development (DFID) of the United Kingdom (UK) spanning from 2015 to 2020.
He said GH-NLA aimed to effectively engage and foster learning among policymakers, private investors, civil society groups and other critical stakeholders on critical issues relating to SAI systems and processes based on concrete research evidence.
In Ghana, the Learning Alliance is being facilitated by the CABI, with support from the Science and Technology Policy Research Institute of the Centre for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR-STEPRI), and under the auspices of the Ministry of Food and Agriculture (MoFA).