In the first part of this article, I wrote about how the people of Dukomang and Apaaso were moved from their ancestral homes in the Volta Region and resettled at Kwahu-Amanfrom in the Eastern Region, as a result of the Volta River Project. What I did not mention was the fact that the then CPP government gave the people the choice of choosing any part of the country they wanted to settle. My father who was the chief of Dukomang and the elders of the town opted to move to Kwahu due to the historical ties that existed between the two communities. They were then joined by the people of Apaaso. Shortly after the resettlement, mechanised farming was introduced to the people.
In brief, mechanised farming is the process of using machinery to massively increase farm output for the purpose of food security and self-sufficiency. Introducing mechanised farming in the resettlement communities was an exemplary idea but in my estimation, it was not well coordinated or supported by adequate policy measures.
The plan was to plough the land for free until the people were in a position to pay for the cost after cultivation of the land. Within a short time, Caterpillar earth-moving equipment had been brought in followed by over 50 tractors with ploughs, harrows etc. To the consternation of the people, the bulldozers wiped out the forests. All the big trees were felled including the thousands of palm trees and everything on the land. As children, these were exciting times. We sometimes skipped school to see these monstrous machines at work. Little did we know what impacts this would have on the community in the years to come! An area measuring between 1,500 and 2,000 acres were cleared, ploughed and harrowed.
Each household was given an allotment of three acres. Maize was supplied to the people for sowing. I should mention that, it was official policy that the farmers could only grow maize and tobacco on their allotments. The tobacco was cultivated for sale to, I believe, the Ministry of Agriculture or one of the tobacco companies. The farmers had no control over the prices. Moreover, the lands were ploughed and reallocated every year. No re-settler held the same parcel of land in consecutive years.
Mechanised farming was hailed as a good move into the future. Fertilisers were supplied free of charge to the settlers and with the heavy rainfall at the time, there were bumper harvests of crops. Life in the town was ‘easy’ then. We were able to buy foodstuffs like plantain, cassava, cocoyam etc. from farmers who brought them from villages across the mountain. River Afram had turned into a substantial lake, measuring about 10 miles across. As a result, fish was in abundance. The town was bustling with people, including the numerous tractor operators and engineers. As children growing up, we loved it!
But the only dark cloud hanging over the town was the introduction of barter trade by the farmers who brought their foodstuffs from the mountains. Instead of bringing their foodstuffs to the market in the town, the farmers sent them to the villages along the lake, where the fishermen lived. They refused to accept money for their produce and insisted on exchanging them for fish. The settlers fought against this form of ‘silent trade’ but the farmers did not budge. They succeeded because their allotments from the government were used ONLY for the cultivation of maize and tobacco. They were not allowed to grow food crops. If one wanted plantain, cassava or cocoyam, he or she had to buy fish from the fishermen and exchange the fish for the produce. It is sad to say that the barter system of trading is still taking place today at Kwahu-Amanfrom.
In the early seventies, the rainfall pattern in the town started changing for the worse. The VRA, in conjunction with the Ministry of Agriculture introduced irrigation to mitigate the consequential effects to keep the process on course. The water was sourced from the Afram Lake for the cultivation of tomatoes, tobacco and maize along the banks of the lake. Within a short time, Kwahu-Amanfrom became famous for tomato production. Buyers came from all parts of the country to purchase the harvests every week. But they would only come when the roads to Nkawkaw and Begoro were good. When the roads were in poor condition, the few buyers who managed to come offered ridiculously low prices. Sometimes the tomatoes would just perish because there would be no buyers at all.
The VRA and the Ministry of Agriculture packed their machinery and left the town after some years, thus leaving the settlers to their fate. The rainfall pattern became so erratic that, the farmers could not even grow maize or tobacco. Some of them however bought their own small pumping machines and pipes and continued to irrigate their crops.
The die had been cast by the destruction of the forest. The VRA and the Ministry of Agriculture with hindsight, should have conducted a thorough research on the environmental consequences of destroying the forest. By the late eighties, the land had virtually turned into grassland and become completely infertile - only nim trees could grow on the land. Eventually, the farmers could not rely on the rain to grow any crops. Mass migration started when the youth and most of the able-bodied men and women began leaving the town to settle at different parts of the country. Those who remained lived in deplorable conditions and poverty became endemic.
Introduction of mechanised farming before the resettled community was ready for it was the straw that broke the camel's back. The settlers were given no training and no programme in respect of when governmental assistance would stop. There was no private farmland ownership. In those days, just after independence, public enlightenment was not great. It was therefore logical for the settlers to presume that governmental support was part of their lives and would remain as a means of compensation for what they had lost.
The mechanised farming was a botched programme. It should have involved appropriate combination of manual and mechanical powered technologies that were technically suitable for the people and met clearly defined economic and social development objectives. Our experts and policy makers failed miserably to foresee the degradative effect of mechanised farming operations on soils. Ploughing a secondary forest in the tropics to wipe out indigenous flora and dowsing the soil with chemical fertilisers in the name of mechanised farming amounts to an ecological blunder, especially if the farming operation is not sustained. Could insufficient vegetation cover have caused changes to the micro-climate of the area and consequently affected the rainfall pattern? This was highly likely. Ecological evidence abounds with information that may be used to attest and substantiate this assertion.
Encouragement of the barter system (trading without cash), restriction of private farmland ownership, state ownership of farm machinery and imposition of crops that could be grown and their purchasing price constituted a coherent agenda to establish a Korean-styled economy. The government used the re-settlers as guinea pigs to implement unsustainable agricultural and social policy - agenda that have not withstood the test of time anywhere in the modern world.
Read Part 3, life after the mechanised farming period. It focuses on the long-term effects of poverty, deaths from hunger, inability to educate the youth, mass migration, social delinquency and premature deaths due to illnesses and environmental hazards peculiar to the resettlement town. In my view, all these amounted to state sponsored perpetual torture of innocent generation of people, who did nothing other than to sacrifice, albeit involuntarily, their valuable treasures for the modernisation of Ghana.
