Ghana’s blessed: Our President is a farmer!

Effective 2027, Ghanaians will not go hungry again.

How do I know? Simple: children of farmers eat three square meals a day. 

Our current President is a farmer! Our Deputy Minister of Agriculture, John Dumelo, is a farmer.

At Yapei and Busunu in the Savannah Region, John Mahama has two farms, one for soya beans and maize. He sells his yellow maize to Asutsuare Farms which uses it for poultry feed.

The other is a livestock farm, boasting some 500 goats and other small ruminants. Begun only five months ago, he plans to add on cattle and sheep.

Dumelo’s farm may not be the biggest in the world, but it is big enough to warrant 100 employees.

How can we fail!

But we are in Ghana where birds fly backwards, where the ingredients for success manage to conspire to spell F-A-I-L-U-R-E. 

Not the first

Mahama and Dumelo are not the first top politicians who have gone into farming. Dating from the (P)NDC SMC era, we have had Commodore Steve Obimpeh (1996 to 1997); Kwabena Agyei (1997-1998); Courage Quashigah (2001-2005). They all had private farms.

Indeed, Dr Owusu Afriyie Akoto, Agric Minister under Nana Akufo Addo, not only had a farm; he actually studied Agriculture to the highest academic level —  a PhD.  

Only one exception: Colonel Frank Bernasko, arguably the most effective Agric Minister since 1957, who is credited with the success of Operation Feed Yourself.

So why, in spite of these, have we failed so miserably?

During the first media visit to his farm last December, President Mahama shared his pains as a farmer.

The 2024 drought destroyed 40 per cent of his crops and, but for a friend who offered him a combine harvester, he would have lost everything. With that experience, he has resolved “to go totally under irrigation”. 

For his part, John Dumelo, as a farmer, identified the following problems, among others: Access to credit and land ownership.

This country has been talking about all of the above problems in agriculture for as long as I have been old enough to read newspapers and watch and listen to radio and television discussions by so-called agric experts with alphabets after their names.

We study Agriculture to PhD level and we have university demonstration farms. We even have a bank that lends to farmers.

So why do we go to bed hungry? Why do we import tomatoes and onions from countries that have been cursed with drought?

Time was when students were feeding from school farms. Wither did the school farms idea flee? 

Transportation

Even General Acheampong, with only a commercial school certificate and military academy qualifications, knew that nobody does agriculture without factoring in the transportation required to haul the produce from the farm gate.

Wasn’t it a shame that under a minister with a PhD in Agriculture, government rented trucks to transport food from the farms to the ministries in Accra! 
Imagine!!

One of the seminal writings on the subject of Agriculture was, Ghana must