Ghana has touted its resolve to outrightly ban the importation of rice into the country, thus achieving rice self-sufficiency by 2022. With some months more into 2022 after declaring the ban two years ago, can this goal be achieved?
The policies being implemented- National Rice Development Strategy (NRDS), Planting for Food and Jobs (PFJ), etc. have favoured rice production, but continue to fall short of the demand with the import share of rice consumed remaining above 50 percent.
Strategically embedded within the NRDS are the focus on interventions in production technology research and dissemination, post-harvest handling and marketing, irrigation development, and support for rice value chain actors.
Consequently, with the policy objective to ensure import substitution, rice enjoys trade protection in the form of a 40 percent import tariff. Nonetheless, rice production has increased by about 10 percent per annum between 2008 and 2019.
Available data from the Ministry of Food and Agriculture (MOFA) and cited by IFRPI revealed that rice production reached 963, 000 tonnes in 2019, equivalent to 665,000 tonnes of milled rice. Also, the national demand for 2019 reached 1.2 million tonnes.
According to MOFA, the country imported US$8 billion worth of rice in 2020, to supplement the deficit in domestic production needed to meet rising domestic consumption. That said, the pattern of rice consumption has been increasing rapidly over the years. Available data from the Ghana Statistical Service (GSS) shows that rice consumption increased from 24kg in 2012/2013 to 35kg in 2016/2017.
Ghana’s rice production potential and local consumption
Rice is a key component of the Ghanaian diet, but not only that, it is also important in terms of income generation for many farmers in Ghana (approximately US$ 5/day of work). According to Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) the income per day of work per farmer would reach approximately USD 9/day of work in the value chain as the current policies continue.
Meanwhile, rice farmers have complained hugely about the fierce competition they face with cheap prices at which imported rice are sold. Therefore, to have such huge imports streaming into the local market presents a plethora of challenges to the Ghanaian rice farmer.
Since December 2019, a campaign has been launched to encourage citizens to purchase made-in-Ghana rice. Although during its inception, many Ghanaians bought into the call and began consuming made in Ghana rice, the enthusiasm has since waned.
That notwithstanding, FAO statistics reveal that, with local production of only 40 percent meeting national demand, demand for rice should grow at an average rate of 2.5% per year. As a result, domestic production would have to achieve a large growth of 23 percent per year in order to achieve self-sufficiency in rice by 2025.
Albeit, FAO indicates that such an option in realistic terms is not viable. And again, reaching self-sufficiency by 2030 would require an annual growth rate of 12%, which is unlikely to happen.
However, FAO proposes that: “… the rice self-sufficiency target is redesigned to achieve at least 74 percent of self-sufficiency by 2030, which is coming from a reduction of rice import by 5.5 percent per year. This should lead to a growth of paddy production from about 752,000 tonnes in 2020 to 1,763 000 tonnes by 2030.”
Its recommendations included inter alia, increasing farm size of irrigated rice of 2% per year, reduction of crop loss from 8 to 2%, moving from 4 to 1% at the production level, and 4 to 1% at the processing level.
The Rwandan Case
Ghana is not the only country to have declared such an over-ambitious rice self-sufficiency target. Rwanda is a case in point, with similar characteristics as Ghana in terms of rice production and imports.
Rwanda has a household food budget of about 8.5 percent allocated to rice, ahead of other staples such as dry beans and Irish potatoes, totalling 6.9 percent.
In 2011, the Rwandan government established in its National Rice Development Strategy to achieve self-sufficiency in rice production by 2018. And thus, substantially raise the competitiveness of Rwandan rice in local and regional markets.
As part of policy actions to limit rice imports over the period, the government adopted a minimum price policy to serve as an incentive for production as well as a rice import tariff (averaging around 40%) over the period to hedge against cheap rice imports inundating the market.
However, by 2018, the goal had not been achieved, even currently, although the policies contributed to increasing domestic production.
FAO noted that, trade barriers imposed by the Rwandan government was rather harming rice production than enabling it. It therefore proposed that, the government should reduce rice import restrictions to benefit consumers.
Also, helping to develop a more efficient and productive sector that could boost local rice exports to emerging regional markets.
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