Agricultural productivity must be research-based to ensure meaningful development - Dr Thomas Abanga
The Chief Executive Officer(CEO) of Abanga Farms and the Abanga Group of Companies, Dr Thomas Abanga, has stated that agricultural productivity, must be research-based, digital and technologically- driven to ensure its meaningful contribution to the development of the country.
“You cannot have consistent, sustainable agricultural production in any agro eco-system without research. You have to know that the soil, seed and machinery must all be complementing each other to ensure a meaningful agricultural productivity” he said.
Dr Abanga stated this in an interview with Graphic Online in Accra after he returned from a six-day international trade expo event held at Swakopmund, a coastal city in Namibia recently.
He said because agriculture was research-based, every component within the value chain must be synchronised.
He warned against too much political interference in agriculture, to the neglect of relying on research and technology to drive agricultural production.
Dr Abanga said the nation's quest to increase agricultural productivity was facing challenges because of political interference, human activities that degrade the environment and climate change issues,
Politics, environment
The CEO and founder said “Until politics is separated from agriculture, we can never have a sustainable production system in Africa to feed our people. They've got to divorce it. And also, the technocrats are the drivers of agriculture. But now, they are into politics and using agriculture as a tool to evangelise, to appease their cronies.”
The CEO was of the view that, “human beings have now become the number one enemy of the environment. There is no way you can do consistent, sustainable, and applied agricultural production without a sustainable environment. Because you need a perfect, sustainable agro-ecosystem to produce real food to feed human beings.”
Dr Abanga, who owns the Abanga Food Systems Limited, a subsidiary of the Abanga group of companies, and operates the food business in Ghana, Namibia and Liberia said it was important for people to give priority to the production of food because every body eats as a necessity.
Climate change
He said one of the biggest challenges hindering increased agricultural productivity was climate change.
“And if you look into whether it's scientific, whether it's nature, whether it's perception, whether it's a fact, the reality is that the weather, the sunshine, the rainfall and the climate is not the same as it was ten or twenty years back” he observed.
Dr Abanga said one of the many disturbing issues he usually brooded over was why Africa was endowed with about 65 per cent of uncultivated land for agricultural production yet the continent couldn’t feed itself and to export its farm produce unlike countries like Israel and Dubai.
Precision, vertical agriculture
He said fast forward to today, there was the need to apply digitalisation in agriculture including what he described as “vertical and precision agriculture”.
Dr Abanga explained that precision agriculture referred to using machines or technology to produce crops through measurements and application of fertilisers in precise quantities as well as determining how to plant crops in rich soil among others.
Vertical agriculture, he said also involved using technology and devices to grow vegetables for instance on walls.