As part of efforts to transform the agricultural industry and consequently, improve the state of Ghana’s economy, Minister for Food and Agriculture, Dr. Owusu Afriyie Akoto has said that government is committed to improving productivity in the industry to ensure that there’s a significant decrease in importation and a substantial increase in exportation of agricultural goods particularly in the poultry production sector in Ghana.
Speaking at the Ghana-Israel Agricultural Technology Breakfast Dialogue Thursday January 25, Dr. Afriyie Akoto bemoaned the current situation where Ghana depends majorly on importation of poultry and other agricultural products as a result of the low production of same in the industry.
According to him, Ghana currently imports several metric tonnes of chicken which is draining the economy whereas it could be making millions of cedis if much more is invested in productivity.
Soya, cocoa, maize among others are also items he believes will draw in more money for the country is much more energy is directed to those areas.
“This government is determined to make agriculture the flagship of its activities by transforming first agriculture itself and through that to transform the economy of Ghana, put it on a much higher plane to generate jobs that our young people need and to generate the income of the poorest of our Ghanaian society, who are these farmers that we see in our rural areas today.”
“It is a kind of social intervention that we are holding, instrument that we want to use to transform, to increase productivity, to increase incomes, to make agriculture more attractive and to be able to export every item not just cocoa, to export maize, to export soya, to export chicken, we are now importing huge amounts of chicken, we are doing something around 150,000 metric tonnes of chicken meat into this country, worth about 350 million US dollars, there’s no use for it.”
Dr. Afriyie Akoto however urged all industry players and stakeholders to join hands to improve productivity in the various sectors to boost revenue and to encourage exportation rather than focus on importation.
“20 years ago, when the Kwabena Darko office were really on top, we were exporting chicken meat so what happened? I think the industry has collapsed and we know why it has collapsed because we are not producing enough chicken feed to be competitive on the market and of course there is a huge element of dumping, 10 year, 15 year old slaughtered chicken being dumped on us so cheap that these importers are going back to their governments to receive their subsidies and creating no space for us within our own domestic area for our poultry farmers to make it and I know that the poultry farmers have been advocating very strongly lately that we should ban the import of meat. We cannot do that until we have the capacity and that capacity can only come when we produce enough maize and soya to feed the industry and that is going to happen in a matter of this year and next year, we should have enough maize and soya to be able to feed our industry to make it competitive and then at that state, we can look at the dumping that is happening in the industry.”
The Ghana-Israel Agricultural Technology Breakfast Dialogue was held at the Kempinsky Hotel in Accra on Thursday January 25, 2018.
The event is a precursor to the 20th International Agricultural Exhibition and Conference Agritech Israel 2018 scheduled to happen in Tel Aviv from May 08-10, 2018 under the theme “Agriculture in arid and semi-arid regons.
