SADA boss urges support for agric
The CEO of Savana Accelerated Development Authority (SADA), Mr Charles Abugre has called on all stakeholders to make a case for an agriculture-led transformation as the main driver of the Ghanaian economy.
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He said the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGS) had offered developing countries such as Ghana an opportunity to think of ending poverty in 15 years by using agriculture to transform the economy out of poverty.
Goal two (2) of SDGS, Zero Hunger, seeks to end hunger, achieve food security and improved nutrition and promote sustainable agriculture.
According to him, during an economic transformation the share of agriculture to Gross Domestic Product (GDP) declines.
However, in the case of Ghana, “we call it premature de-industralisation because the trajectory is that you go to agriculture to manufacturing and then from manufacturing to services. But we haven’t manufactured and we are into services which in our case the service is retail and wholesale and this must worry us,” he said at an agriculture forum in Accra.
Agric-led transformation
He said that African governments made progressive statements in international circles during the formulation of the SDGS when they talked about economic transformation rooted in agriculture.
“If we wanted to industrialise it has to be on the back of agric. If we wanted to do value added services such as banking, insurance, ICT related, marketing, all these have to be at the back of agric. So agric-led transformation is different from transforming the economic trend,” he said.
He said that so far as the SGDG Goal 2 talks about sustainable agriculture tied to food and nutrition, the country’s focus on agriculture should be multi-sector approach.
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Ministry’s take
The Minister for Food and Agriculture, Fiifi Kwetey, charged the farmers to do more for themselves rather than always waiting for the government to come up with something.
He said the government was working to address most of the challenges farmers were facing.
According to him, gone were the days that farming was seen as an undertaken when you have nothing to do and a lot of work needed to be done to change such perception.
“The problem is farmers across the world have not made it from poverty into prosperity over the years,” he said.
He said the role of the agricultural sector to a nation’s economy could never be over emphasised. The sector contributes to the Gross Domestic Product and also supplies the food needs of the country as well as creates jobs for the citizenry.
Mr Kwetey said it is through agriculture that the government had constructed 646.2 kilometers of feeder roads to link farms to the market centers to improve access to farm products.
Also the sector’s allocation in the 2016 budget has increased from GH₵ 411.8 million to GH₵ 501 million. — GB