Citizen Watch, one of the leading think-tank organisations in the country, has commended the Ministry of Food and Agriculture for the food efficiency achieved last year.
The MoFA’s record of higher yields last year was based on effective input distribution, extension services and the weather.
The effective input distribution was achieved through electronic biometric registration, which has currently registered over 500,000 farmers throughout the country and also linked with mobile money services.
This means that about that 500,000 farmers are now using the mobile input acquisition platform which is to help farmers reduce stress, acquire relevant information on good agriculture practices, weather, quality input, markets-tendency, among others.
To this end, Citizen Watch is urging government to increase farmer biometric registration to cover about 2.5 million farmers as well as expand the extension services to achieve higher yields this year.
Citizen Watch was of the view that there is a need for government to zone the country and establish commodity centres in the hinterlands, such as Techiman and Wenchi, which would make industries to spring up so that indigenes benefit from the value-chain process as they call on government to build a resilient value-chain support system.
It will also enable the people to enjoy financial inclusion, such as insurance for the 2.5 million farmers. This will have a social impact on the economy.
To this end, Citizen Watch has called on the Bank of Ghana to work hand-in-hand with the Agriculture Ministry to sure effective financial inclusion for the farmers.
Already, Ghana has started exporting part of its food crops to neighbouring countries such as Togo, Cote d’Ivoire among others.
According to Citizen Watch, agriculture is the mainstay of the economy and plays a vital role in the lives of Ghanaians; hence there is need for government to give credit-support to farmers.
Citizen Watch is asking government to as a matter of urgency link the farmer and farmer groups into a reliable outgrower programmes that will integrate into a higher skill commercial supply base for the nation’s industrialisation agenda, which includes the One ‘District-One Factory’, ‘One Village-One Dam’ initiatives among others.
Source: BestNewsGH.com
