About seven hundred acres of rice farms in the Volta region have dried up due to severe weather conditions in the area.
The unfortunate natural disaster has seen some 600 farmers at Klenomadzi and Devego, near Dzodze in the Ketu North Municipality of the Volta Region, losing their vast rice farms to drought.
This unfortunate incident is as a result of the area not recording any rainfall in the past four months and the River Kpli, on which the rice farmers depend for growing their crop also drying up.
This situation has now deprived the farmers of their livelihood, which is rice cultivation.
The National Disaster Management Organization (NADMO), on the other hand has also estimated the damage at GHS 300, 000.
In an interaction with NADMO officials who toured the affected farms concerning the issue, TorgbiGbordzor V11, chief of Klenomadzi told the team that, the farmers who took loans to produce rice were in a serious state of calamity as their creditors were now knocking at their doors demanding repayment.
He said the future looks very miserable for the farmers and appealed to the government to come to the aid of the farmers immediately with a rescue package to enable them to repay their loans.
The Municipal NADMO Director, Mr. Wornoo, also gave the assurance that the team would immediately liaise with regional and national NADMO head offices in Ho and Accra respectively to identify the appropriate relief measures for the affected farmers.
He entreated the rice farmers to henceforth insure their farms against the ravages of crop failure and also form an association to enable them to secure easier and more flexible loans in future.
Water supply from the irrigation plant to Afife does not extend to the farms in Klenomadzi and Devego, a predicament which leaves the farmers to rely exclusively on River Kpli for water to their farms.
Other crops such as cassava and maize are also cultivated in the area but not on large scales.
In other related stories, just last week, about 300 hectares (750 acres) of rice farms belonging to 250 farmers in the Fumbisi rice valley in the Builsa South District of the Upper East Region have been abandoned for lack of chemicals to fight the infection by weeds known as “wild rice”.
The few farmers who still remain in the valley are using traditional methods of farming to uproot the wild rice tillers which is time-consuming and capital intensive to hire labourers to undertake the exercise.
Many of the farmers, stated that the government promised to provide them with farm inputs in the farming season, which encouraged most of them to expand their farms which unfortunately did not materialize.
They have pleaded with the government and researchers to intervene with a lasting antidote to deal with the wild rice infection in order for rice farmers to have the motivation to grow more rice.
There are rice fields totalling 850 hectares (2125 acres) fully developed in nine valleys in the Builsa South District and each year, between 5.5 and 5.8 metric tons of rice is cultivated in the valleys by 894 rice farmers, including out-growers, and their effort is above the national rice cultivation.
