Pay attention to decline in agricultural production— Minority
The Minority in Parliament has urged the government to pay urgent attention to the decline in agricultural production, instead of focusing largely on the oil and gas industry.
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They contend that Ghana’s agricultural growth is stagnating, resulting in the dwindling fortunes of the economy and contributing to an increase in poverty.
Addressing a press conference in Goaso yesterday, the Minority Spokesman on Food and Agriculture, Dr Owusu-Afriyie Akoto, said the government was paying lip service to agriculture by implementing feeble, inappropriate and contradictory policies that had plagued the performance of the sector.
“Ghana’s agriculture is not growing. If agricultural growth is stagnating, then it means industry, especially agro-industry, cannot grow. The combined effect of this is that employment cannot be generated. Farmers make up about 60 per cent of the country’s populace. If agriculture is not growing, then it means the poverty of the people will not be alleviated,” he said.
Stunted growth
Describing Ghana’s agriculture as stagnant or at best sluggish, Dr Akoto said growth in the sector declined from 7.4 per cent in 2008 to 7.2 per cent in 2009, slowing down to 5.2 per cent in 2010 and hitting a bottom of 0.8 per cent in 2011.
He said the sector registered a 2.3 percentage growth in 2012, recovering partially to 5.2 per cent in 2013 and 5.3 per cent in 2014.
He attributed the growth in those two years to the unprecedented growth in forestry and logging activities.
He said the crops sub-sector which engaged most of the 4.5 million farmers in the country recorded growth of only 3.6 per cent in 2014.
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The 2015 budget statement expects a 5.8 per cent growth in agriculture, but Dr Akoto stated that that target growth was overstated because there was a sharp decline in cocoa production in the 2014/2015 cocoa season, coupled with the rising retail price of fertiliser.
Cocoa
He predicted a huge decline in Ghana’s cocoa production in the coming years if the government continued with its “misguided policies and poor implementation of projects” in that sector.
He forecast that the production of the country’s main export commodity might dip to below 500,000 metric tonnes from the current 900,000 metric tonnes if the interventions put in place by the previous government were not critically appraised.
According to him, since the attainment of the record one million metric tonnes in the 2011 crop season, there had been a consistent decline in output to figures below 900,000 metric tonnes in three consecutive seasons.
“At less than 700,000 tonnes, production in the current 2014/2015 crop season is one of the lowest in the past decade. This steady and consistent decline in cocoa production since 2010/2011 is a reflection of both the misguided policies and poor implementation of projects pursued by the NDC administration,” he observed.
He named the challenges militating against cocoa production in the country as the unreliable supply of inputs to farmers as a direct result of the “free” input policy adopted by the government, new brands of chemical inputs released to cocoa farmers in Ghana without adequate trials and research by designated institutions, low producer prices paid to farmers and the politicisation of the mass spraying and fertiliser distribution programme.
Dr Akoto said the smuggling of cocoa and its subsidised inputs into neighbouring countries as a direct consequence of the input distribution system and the product pricing policies of the government, as well as the refusal of the government to pay annual production bonuses to farmers, was the other factor inhibiting growth in the cocoa sub-sector.
He said the delay in the payment of cocoa farmers for their produce, even after Parliament had approved of foreign loans to the Ghana Cocoa Board to purchase cocoa beans from the farmers, was affecting the production levels of the country’s number one export commodity.
He accused the government of failing to fulfil promises made to cocoa farmers to provide them with incentives such as housing, a pension scheme and feeder roads to cocoa growing communities
He said the government had also failed to address the problem of mass destruction of cocoa trees by illegal and small-scale miners (galamsey) in major cocoa-producing regions, particularly Western and Ashanti, adding, “If these measures are not addressed urgently, there is a danger that annual production could conceivably decline further in the coming years to below 500,000 metric tonnes – the levels of the l990s.”
To avert that danger, Dr Akoto said the government needed to shift its focus and continue with the policies pursued by the New Patriotic Party when it was in government and which resulted in the production of one million metric tonnes of cocoa.
Staple foods
On staple foods, he said growth in the production of cereals, legumes, roots and tuber had been sluggish in many years.
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That, he said, had reduced food security in the country.
According to him, the large yearly fluctuations in the production of maize and rice witnessed and the sharp increase in the import of rice from 384,400 metric tonnes in 2009 to 645,000 metric tonnes in 2013 attested to deepening food insecurity in the country.