Seed Implementation Plan being developed

Dec - 09 - 2014 , 23:32 2 minutes read

Players in the seed industry are meeting in Tamale to discuss and make inputs into a National Seed Implementation Plan being developed to provide a framework and ensure efficiency, transparency and competitiveness in the industry.

The cabinet has already approved the National Seed Policy which addresses the neglected areas, especially those that hold the key to the attainment of food security.

Consensus building

The Tamale meeting is part of a series of nationwide validation workshops organised and sponsored by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) under its Agriculture Technology Transfer (ATT) project in collaboration with its partners to gain national consensus on the national seed plan.

At the northern sector validation workshop in Tamale, the acting Chief of Party of the ATT project, Mr Brain Kiger, said the project was supporting the formulation of the national seed plan to provide a clear framework for the implementation of the national seed policy and law.

He stated that currently, significant progress had been made in the formulation process and a series of meetings had been held between the collaborating institutions.

Support to agriculture

A Food Security Specialist at the Economic Growth Office, USAID, Ghana, Mr Stephen Konlan, in an interview said the US Government through the USAID had made available $22 million to help modernise agriculture in northern Ghana to increase the yields of farmers and ensure food security for the country.

He said the five-year project, dubbed “Feed the Future, USAID Agriculture Technology Transfer Project (FTF-USAID-ATT)” was to increase the availability and use of agricultural technologies to improve and sustain productivity.

Views by specialists

A former Head of the Seed Division, Ministry of Food and Agriculture (MOFA) and a Senior Seed Advisor to the ATT project, Mr Cletus Achaab, said the overall objective of the national seed plan was to serve as a guide for the implementation of the seed law and policy to ensure that the farmers got quality seed to plant to increase their yield to enable the country to attain food security.