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 Dr Owusu Afriyie Akoto
Dr Owusu Afriyie Akoto

Govt employs 1,200 extension officers to facilitate agric initiative

The Ministry of Food and Agriculture (MoFA) has employed 1,200 agricultural extension graduates who are currently undergoing reorientation in various regions across the country, the sector minister, Dr Owusu Afriyie Akoto, has said.

He disclosed that MoFA needed about 4,500 extension officers in the country but currently had 2,600, and about 80 per cent of those in active service are due for retirement within the next two years.

According to the minister, it is for this reason that more people have been engaged to facilitate the government’s ‘Planting for Food and Jobs’ programme.

Addressing some private sector players on the initiative (as captured in the 2017 budget) in Accra, Dr Akoto said extension services to farmers would be part of the government’s technical assistance for the 200,000 farmers who would be selected to plant one or more of the five crops identified under the programme.

The crops are maize, soya, rice, sorghum and vegetables. The government says it will invest GH¢160 million into the project to generate about GH¢1.3 billion in revenues and create over 750,000 direct and indirect jobs.

Measures

Dr Akoto gave an assurance that measures had been put in place to ensure that technical support and subsidies on fertiliser and other inputs would actually reach farmers.

The measures include working with a private agriculture support company, Esoko, to take the biometric data of all farmers selected under the programme. The geographic coordinates of the farmlands they would cultivate would also be picked and matched with their biometric details.

“Esoko is taking the fingerprints and details of the farmers for the purpose of linking their fingerprints with the coordinates of the land they will present to farm on. This is to ensure that the interventions by the government reach the right targets.”

“With this, we will be able to track every input that the government supplies and also track the output from the various farms,” the minister added.

Programme

The government’s support for the initiative is anchored on the provision of high quality seeds, subsidised fertilisers and dedicated extension services to farmers.

It will also include a comprehensive marketing, information and communications and technology (ICT) based agriculture system (E-agric) and monitoring schemes that will help to optimise agricultural productivity.

Dr Akoto added that MoFA was already linking up with stakeholders such as the World Food Programme (WFP) and private sector players to create market for the produce and also invest in the construction of warehouses.

According to the minister, his outfit was also in talks with the Agricultural Development Bank (ADB), which has a wide network across the country and is abreast of financing agriculture, to provide credit to farmers to maintain their farms as well as receive payments for subsidised inputs.

Dr Akoto said the four-year programme was targeting about half of the five million farmers in the country, adding that “this will be a total transformation of the economy as it will provide surpluses for industries to process”.

Marketing, storage infrastructure

Inadequate marketing and lack of storage infrastructure, particularly warehouses and roads to link farms to marketing centres, are among challenges that could hinder the smooth implementation of the programme, the minister observed.

 

Dr Akoto, therefore, called for private sector participation to close the warehousing gap and also provide some haulage services.

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