GHANA-AGRICULTURE: Farmers Beseiged by a Host of Impediments

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Edward Ameyibor

ACCRA, Nov 6 1996 (IPS) - Farm production in Ghana has increased slightly in recent years but inadequate transport, marketing difficulties and insufficient irrigation are holding back the agriculture sector’s development.

They are also hampering efforts by the small farmers who account for much of the West African nation’s agricultural output to increase their earnings.

Paul Genyo and ‘John the Baptist’ Kaba live at opposite ends of the country but their experiences are similar. Genyo’s community, Peki, is in the south, about 86 km from Accra, while Tono, Kaba’s district, is close to the border with Burkina Faso, Ghana’s northern neighbour.

Both say their main problem is marketing.

Kaba grows tomatoes on his one-acre (0.4 ha) plot. He and other farmers in his area depend on the enterprising women from the big towns in the south, Accra and Takoradi, and Kumasi in the centre, who travel to the more remote parts of the country to buy up farm produce and resell it to retailers.

“They know the tomatoes are perishable and, whether we like it or not, we cannot eat all of them. So they dictate how much they will pay,” Kaba complains. “Sometimes when prices are around 30- 40,000 cedis in Accra or Tema, they buy from us at a meagre 5,000 cedis.”

One U.S. dollar exchanges at about 1,666 cedis.

Good rains this year enabled Paul Genyo to increase his maize harvest, while his oranges and mangoes also did well. But he, too, has had marketing problems.

He says farmers in his area also contribute to their difficulties: instead of organising themselves into a cooperative and thus force the wholesale buyers to give them good prices or rent a truck to get their produce to Accra, they each go it alone, to their detriment.

“There is no unity among us and no understanding,” says Genyo. “We do not trust each other, so we cannot come together to sell our produce or approach anyone for assistance.”

In Kaba’s case, things could have been worse. With more civil servants going into tomato farming, and a reliable telephone service now in place in Navrongo, the nearest town to Tono, farmers were able to quote the latest Accra prices and get the wholesale buyers to give them a little more than they had originally offered. Still, it was less than they had hoped for.

The real solution, he says, lies in processing. A tomato- processing factory was built in the 1960s in Pwagalu, 16km from Tono, but this has not helped the farmers much, according to Kaba. “When the factory … is working, there are no tomatoes,” he says. “When there are tomatoes, the factory has broken down.”

Another problem facing agriculture, which accounts for 46 percent of Ghana’s gross domestic product (GDP), is that much of it is rain-fed. While the south usually receives a fair amount of rainfall, the north is often hit by drought since it lies in the Sahel, the broad belt immediately south of the Sahara that runs from Senegal in the west to Sudan in the east.

The agriculture ministry estimates that only 10,000 of the 5.3 million hectares of land under cultivation in Ghana are irrigated.

Figures from the ministry show that there has been an increase in national yields in some sub-sectors — cereal production, for example, went up by 45 percent to 1.842 million tonnes between 1992 and 1995.

However, agricultural production as a whole increased on average by just 1.8 percent each year from 1990 to 1994, whereas annual population growth in the same period was 2.8 percent, according to the World Bank’s 1996 World Development Report.

“The low rate of growth in agricultural production is primarily due to low levels of investment and technological improvement in the sector generally,” a Ghanaian government official told IPS, explaining that many farmers still used hoes and cutlasses and cultivated small plots.

The difficulties that beset agriculture have also discouraged many young people from entering the sector. “It is not uncommon to see aged farmers in most food-growing areas in the countryside,” the official said.

Food and Agriculture Minister Commodore Steve Obimpeh admits that “a lot more has to be done in the agriculture sector” to increase its contribution to general economic growth.

“There is no doubt the Economic Recovery Programme (begun in 1983) has chalked up successes but if we do not get agriculture going vigorously, the success won’t be felt much,” he said.

An Agriculture Sector Investment Programme (ASIP) has been put in place to enhance the production, processing and marketing of agricultural produce. It focusses mainly on setting up more markets near production areas, improving access to these areas by building roads and bridges, and developing processing plants.

ASIP also aims to increase the acreage under irrigation to about 100,000 ha, but this would still fall short of what the country needs for year-round production.