The Ministry of Food and Agriculture (MOFA), through its flagship project, the Savannah Zone Agricultural Productivity Improvement Project (SAPIP), has organized a market access linkage event for various actors in the agricultural value chain to interact amongst themselves and strike their own business deals in terms of quantities, qualities and price of agri-produce they require.
The Savannah Zone Agricultural Productivity Improvement Project (SAPIP), funded by Africa Development Bank (AfDB), aims at transforming agricultural value chains for food and nutrition security, job and wealth creation in the Northern Savannah Zone of Ghana.
At the market access linkage event held in Tamale, Mr. Felix Darimaani, the National Coordinator of SAPIP, who addressed the event, indicated that because limited market access has always been a challenge to farmers, the event is to ensure that “we establish strong linkages such that even after the project, farmers can call the off-takers to buy their produce.”
“We are supporting thousands of farmers to produce rice, soybean and maize, and so we have to ensure that our farmers do not just produce and are unable to market. We have to ensure that they are able to market their products and get good money for their labour,” he added.
He said “agriculture is profitable and people should invest in it” urging farmers to have the profit-oriented mentality and not thinking of farming as subsistence. He further encouraged farmers who benefited from the free inputs under the project to pay back on time to enable others also benefit in order to make the project successful and sustainable.
Speaking on the impact of the SAPIP on crop production, Mashud Mohammed, a large-scale soybean farmer in the Northern Region, revealed that supports farmers received under the SAPIP helped them to cultivate large acreages of soybean, rice, and maize, thus increasing their yields and in turn their income levels. He added that increased farmers’ yields require access to the markets, thus lauding the annual market linkage event for providing them with the opportunity to market their produce and to access reliable agro-inputs.
SAPIP is also implementing the Technologies for African Agricultural Transformation in the Savannah (TAAT-S) under the AfDB’s Feed Africa Strategy initiative, which aims to test at scale, viable commercial conservation agriculture system in the northern savannah ecological zone for the promotion of maize, soybean, and poultry value chains. Under the project, a total land area of about 8,148 hectares were cultivated in the 2020 cropping season to high yielding maize hybrids and soybean varieties using best agricultural practices under conservation agriculture.
The expanded TAAT-S initiative is expected to reach 15,000 hectares in 2021, and 20,000 hectares in 2024.
