Minister for Food and Agriculture (MoFA), Bryan Acheampong, has encouraged smallholder farmers and aggregators to position themselves to benefit from the Planting for Food and Jobs programme (PFJ 2.0) second phase initiated by government.
PFJ 2.0 aims to improve service delivery to maximise impact, and substitute direct input subsidy with smart agriculture financial support in the form of comprehensive input credit.
It will also ensure food security, import substitution, promotion of exports, job creation for youths and resilience for value chain actors in the industry.
The sector minister, represented by Principal Agriculture Economist Charles Ayueboro Adama, announced this at the Sensitisation forum on PFJ 2.0, Africa Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) and capacity building workshop on quality, standard and packing of food products held in Tamale, Northern Region.
The forum, organised by the Peasant Farmers Association of Ghana (PFAG) in collaboration with the Ministry of Food and Agriculture and AfCFTA, aimed at building the capacity of smallholder farmers and aggregators for quality products with good packaging to meet standards of the intra-African trade market.
The sensitisation programme was attended by farmers, researchers, extension agents, academia, agricultural experts and aggregators from the five regions of the North.
Mr. Adama commended smallholder farmers for their contributions toward enhancing food security in the country, saying: “Government acknowledges your toil, and some policies and interventions are being put in place to salvage your plight”.
“The PFJ 2.0 module is going to allow a lot of farmers to venture into agriculture. With the input support being provided as credit and repayment in kind at end of the cropping season, mechanisation support and extension services will help the farmers’ development to increase productivity,” he said.
According to him, financial institutions will advance credit guarantees to input suppliers, enabling them to supply the inputs to farmers registered under them.
He said the module not only focuses on smallholder farmers but all farmers in general, to help increase productivity.
Dr. Charles Nyaaba, Executive Director-PFAG said agriculture is an important sector in the Ghanaian economy; and anytime agriculture performs poorly, it affects the economy’s various sectors.
“When you take 2022 and 2023 for instance – when agriculture failed to deliver, industries suffered while thousands of people lost their jobs in the sector; because agriculture could not deliver raw materials – for poultry farmers especially,” he said.
Budget allocation
According to him, the GH¢3.717billion Ghana cedis representing 1.95% of the total 2023 budget allocated to agriculture has not been disbursed to the farmers; meanwhile, the farming season is almost over.
Tax waivers
“We realised that in 2021 the International Monetary Fund’s (IMF) conditions on tax-waivers for agro-inputs, equipment and chemicals have all been taken out – leading to almost doubling the price of these inputs. In view of that, when the importers bring them, they add the duty cost to products; thereby making it difficult for us to actually operate,” he stated.
“We are therefore calling on government to with immediate effect bring back the tax-waivers that we were benefitting from regarding import duties,” he appealed.
Interventions
He said anytime government interventions are made for smallholder farmers, they end up in the hands of social media farmers who go and parade themselves at the ministries as party sympathisers or agric experts, thereby diverting the funds from their purpose.
“What the farmers are saying is that we expect government to deal with them directly – those who are on the field doing the work, rather than dealing with social media farmers which might not be helping in achieving the goals of government programmes,” he said.
