Mr Ibrahim Akalbila, the National Coordinator of the Ghana Trade and Livelihood Coalition (GTLC) has bemoaned the lack of consistent efforts on the part of government to generate reliable market access for farmers.
According to Mr Akalbila, the Government Flagship programmes built on five pillars are deviating from the original plans. As such, he intimated there is the need for a holistic implementation of such programmes and not just provision of seeds and fertilizer alone.
Mr Ibrahim Akalbila noted that the Planting for Food and Jobs (PFJs) programme which has been running for the past five years is based only on production, where provision of fertilizer and seeds are the only intervention. This, he said is inadequate.
“There were cases where seeds sown did not germinate, some fertilizers supplied were not what the farmers needed and what only works for some farmers is when they have a good rainfall. However, the key aspect we needed was market access.”
Mr Ibrahim Akalbila
As part of the PFJs interventions, Mr Akalbila indicated that inadequate extension services to farmers, lack of marketing opportunities and E-Agriculture that allowed farmers and stakeholders to monitor and track activities and progress of the farmers through use of technology was woefully poor.
Mr Akalbila decried that the wholesale purchase of seeds and the subsequent supply to farmers; fertilizer importation to the farmers by government; and the private sector with Policy institutions meddling with sales of food to farmers are not a safe way to go as it has caused the trust of the farmers in the interventions to drop.
The farmers, he Indicated, were given farm inputs, but not educated on the mode of applications “It is not enough until people are educated on how to use them, otherwise they would continue to do the old ways of cropping and learning from peers whether right or wrong.”
Responding to his outfit’s interventions, Mr Akalbila iterated that the GTLC continued to focus on whole market structure as an aggregate to business and cited the promotion of Ghana’s locally produced rice particularly from the northern parts of Ghana, where people shied away from it because of stones.
According to the National Coordinator of the GTLC, the GTLC interventions have led to people investing in milling facilities to remove stones from the rice. However, he acknowledged that it was not about milling to remove stones alone, but “it requires a complete market system”.
Mr Akalbila also bemoaned the current challenge of food prices in the market and noted that it is a food security threat, “if anyone is unable to buy food then he or she is not food secured”.
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