General Secretary of the General Agriculture Workers Union (GAWU), Edward Kareweh, has lamented the agricultural output in the year 2022.
According to him, the sector was an absolute disaster especially with the soaring prices of food and foodstuffs that occasioned the year. He revealed that this is so because government did not invest more in 2022, so it reflected in the yields.
Mr Kareweh indicated that yields were very poor in 2022 and therefore reflected in the non-availability of foodstuffs. Owing to this, he expressed the need for government to “clear this because there’s this whole thing that there’s always food”.
“I think that the agriculture in the year 2022 has been a disaster. It has been a disaster in the sense that we are not interested in statistics and statistics do not put food on anybody’s table. You go to the field, and you find out that there is nothing; you talk about maize, there’s no maize, you talk about rice there’s no rice. Last year this time, a bag of maize in the northern part of the country was between GHC150 to GHC200. Today, it is GHC450 to GHC550…”
Edward Kareweh
Providing an overview of agriculture in 2022 and whether the ministry of food and agriculture’s stance that statistics proved growth in the sector, Mr Kareweh questioned whether government wants the country to get to the point of famine to know there’s no food.
He stated that when the country gets to the point of famine, it means that Ghanaians are “dying off”.
“But what we have in our system today is that yes, you have food but it’s not affordable, you have food, but people cannot make choices. For me, it has been a long time I’ve experienced the level of low output of agriculture as it happened in 2022.”
Edward Kareweh
Recounting the famine that occurred in 1983, Mr Kareweh noted that it does not match with last year’s because the 1983 situation was more “catastrophic” than it is now.
“We can only say that from 1983 to now, what we experienced in 2022, in between, there’s no year that you’ll find such a bad agricultural output. But certainly, it’s not comparable to the 1983 situation because we all know the multiple factors that conspired to make the 1983 a very outstanding year, a very bad year in our history.”
Edward Kareweh
Performance of staple foods in the country
Commenting on how staples like maize, millet, yam, plantain, fared in the country, the GAWU General Secretary explained that the agriculture development policy which was the Planting for Food and Jobs, recognizes that government could not overnight cover all the crop areas. As such, government started with five crop areas to support and produce some major staple foods and progressively added others as the years went by.
Mr Kareweh highlighted that due to this, government shouldn’t expect to have food sufficiency in all these crop areas.
“… Unfortunately, when you hear the statistics and the statements that Ghana is self-sufficient in food production, you ask yourself, food is made up of a number of foodstuffs; which of them are you talking about? As a country, we need to be more strategic…”
Edward Kareweh
Mr Kareweh noted that government is however trying to create the impression that the sector is self-sufficient in everything. Nonetheless, underscored that 2022 exposed the weaknesses of the agricultural policies, particularly the Planting for Food and Jobs for all these years.
On his part, a lecturer with the department of agricultural economics and extension at the University of Cape Coast, Dr Lawrence Acheampong, revealed that a major phenomenon which occurred in 2022 was the high cost of food products. He indicated that per the numbers from the ministry, it may appear that generally it hasn’t been that bad, although that was perhaps influenced by the “PFJ markets that we were having in Accra and other parts of the country”.
“So, quantitatively, we can say that yes, looking at the challenges that we were having within the year 2022, there has been some moderate growth. However, its impact on the general populace hasn’t been that of what we had expected because it hasn’t been that good. For the general populace, what we are interested in is to have food products at a cheaper cost and that hasn’t truly been the case…”
Dr Lawrence Acheampong
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