District agric officers commit financial infractions — A-G Report

The 2015 Auditor-General's Report has cited the Ministry of Food and Agriculture of committing various financial infractions in the district offices.

The infractions included failure to retrieve payments for tractors from farmers and engaging in uncompetitive procurement processes.

For instance, the report indicated that GH¢16 million for the sale of tractors to farmers at Sekyere Odumasi in the Ashanti Region was still outstanding.

At the sitting of the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) of Parliament in Accra, the district agriculture officers said the defaulting farmers had been written to and their names published in the media.

The officers said 25 of the farmers had been surcharged for failure to pay for the tractors.

They said the tractors were in bad shape, hence their inability to retrieve them.

Another infraction was the failure to retrieve money for the sale of vaccines in the Upper West Region.

The Agriculture Officer in charge of the Upper West Region, Dr Rashid Gyemah, told the PAC that only 1,400 people out of the 9,402 who had procured the vaccines had paid back.

The report indicated that the various districts had caused the state to lose hundreds of Ghana cedis through the purchase of items of only one source.

Corrections

A Deputy Minister of Food and Agriculture, Dr Sagre Bambangi, said the ministry had taken steps to streamline the procurement process.

He stated that farmers were now made to pay the full cost of tractors before picking them.

He said another arrangement was for the farmers to pay 50 per cent of the cost of the tractors in addition to bank guarantees.

That, Dr Bambangi said, was to guarantee the payment of the tractors.

Action on infractions

Members of the PAC expressed concern about the financial infractions at the various district agriculture offices and urged the minister to take action to reverse the trend.

The Minister of Food and Agriculture, Dr Owusu Afriyie Akoto, said he welcomed the call to action.

He said he would study the situation and take steps to improve the performance of the district offices.

Army worms

The claim as to whether the fall army worms had been defeated or not also took centre stage at the sitting.

While Dr  Akoto insisted that the army worms had been defeated, the Member of Parliament (MP) for Builsa South, Dr Clement Apaak, rejected that claim and indicated that the worms were still causing havoc to crops in the country.

Dr Apaak, a member of the PAC, said he had personally seen the fall army worms on various farms in the Builsa South District and wanted to know whether Dr Akoto stood by his earlier statement on the floor of Parliament that the army worms had been defeated.

Responding, Dr Akoto said the worms had been defeated in the country, noting, however, that biologically it was difficult to say that all the worms had been eliminated.

He said the country cultivated more than one million hectares of farms and indicated that the worms invaded only 124,000 hectares of maize and destroyed 14,000 farms.

Dr Akoto added that farms in the Builsa South District were only a small fraction of farms in the country and, therefore, even if all the farms in the district were destroyed, "it does not mean the fall army worms have not been defeated".

Dr Apaak, however, refuted the minister's claim that the worms had been defeated, since they were still destroying farms in his district, a situation which had depressed farmers.