Peasant farmers call for engagement over agric interventions

The Peasant Farmers Association of Ghana (PFAG) has welcomed the raft of interventions by the government to contain the looming food crisis, as drought sweeps across the key food production zones during the main farming season.

The association, however, said the ban on grains export was “premature”, “hasty” and came without the necessary consultations to find a better way to handle the prevailing situation.

The Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of the Business Unit of the association, Dr Charles Nyaaba, told the Daily Graphic yesterday that the government’s intended support was timely and that the association “welcomes government efforts to ease farmers’ situation from the impact of the drought experienced”.

Engagement hopes

The Minister of Food and Agriculture, Dr Bryan Acheampong, announced at a news conference in Accra last Monday that a GH¢8 billion ($500 million) plan of interventions in the agriculture sector to prevent a potential food crisis resulting from the drought being experienced in the main farming season would be rolled out.

“We only hope that there will be proper engagement to ensure that when it comes to distribution, the actual victims of the drought are those who benefit, but not those we call social media farmers who are always smart,” Dr Nyaaba, who is a former Executive Director of the association, said.

He said about 600,000 registered peasant farmer members of the association, who formed 60 per cent of the group, had been impacted by the drought, with the consequences reaching beyond their inability to recover investments into the planting season.

“We just hope that it (the intervention) will trickle down to reach the actual farmers who deserve it. But our concern is that this intervention wouldn't have been necessary if we were focusing enough on irrigation and if we were thinking ahead,” Dr Nyaaba said.

He said if the government’s budgetary allocation to the agriculture sector had been adequate and if it had provided the necessary support to the sector over the years, the drought condition would not have been felt on food production.

In the 2024 national budget, for instance, the government allocated about GH¢3 billion to the Ministry of Food and Agriculture (MoFA).

Dr Nyaaba said the amount was inadequate and would not enable the ministry to execute the necessary interventions that would prevent  a looming crisis such as the current projections about food production shortage in the country.

“MoFA’s total annual budget is less than half of the $500 million (about GH¢8 billion) that is allocated for these issues. So, if we put this into creating irrigation facilities, in creating small dugouts, providing farmers with a water pumping machine, at least, they would have been able to rely on that as a backup so that when the rains are not coming, they can use that. And then there wouldn't be the need for all this”.

“But usually, we wait; when matters like this happen then, we now look everywhere to get a solution to it,” he added.

Dr Nyaaba said the ban on maize export was a “non-starter” which “will not solve the problem” it was intended to solve, citing a similar action in 2023 as a measure to contain the cut of grains imports from Ukraine when its war with Russia started.

He said farmers were exploited at the time through cheap prices by middlemen who eventually managed to smuggle the produce across the borders.

“Others who were also well connected managed to get permits to export them to the detriment of the farmer,” he said, adding that the farmers could not maintain their farm sizes in subsequent planting seasons because they could not make enough,” he said.

“Many of them went off production, others had to reduce their farm sizes, others looked for alternative businesses because it didn't make sense for them to produce and sell at a price lower than their production cost,” he added.

Dr Nyaaba said the association proposed at the time that the government could buy from the farmers directly by covering their cost of production and a margin of profit.

“There will be a fixed price that will call for only their cost of production with small margin. Once you do that, our membership cuts across the entire country, we will go and work with our farmers to mobilise all these commodities and store them at government-designated warehouses. So, we had that engagement with government,” he said.