President John Dramani Mahama has launched an agricultural initiative aimed at enhancing the country’s agric sector and ensuring food security.
The Ghana Agricultural Sector Investment Program (GASIP), launched in Accra, is a six-year initiative, worth $113 million, being financed by the International Fund for Agriculture Development (IFAD) and implemented by the Ministry of Food and Agriculture (MOFA).
The initiative, government says, is meant to support infrastructure development, technology transfer, ‘conservation’ farming and research.
In a speech read on his behalf by the Minister of Food and Agriculture, Fiifi Kwetey, President John Mahama said government would work hard to modernise agriculture to attract the youth to farming, as it offered a huge opportunity to address the country’s unemployment situation.
He further explained that agriculture held the best prospects for the concept of self-employment hence government’s provision of various funding and other support policies as well as support for the GASIP initiative.
President Mahama opined that for agriculture to be attractive to the youth, the living conditions in rural areas had to be improved with the provision of good roads that would link farming communities to market and urban centres as well as other infrastructure.
“…our youth cannot be attracted to agriculture and inherit from their ageing parents if we expect them to go the hoe and cutlass methods of farming,” the President stressed.
He said GASIP was an expansion of the Northern Rural Growth Programme, an initiative started in 2009 to promote agriculture and development in the Northern sector of the country. He further advised the youth to take advantage of the GASIP initiative to create jobs for themselves and others as well.
Ides de Willebois, Director of the West and Central African Division of the IFAD, said his outfit had provided a grant of $10 million to support farmers in the country to withstand the effect of climate change.
The amount, he said, was to aid farmers engage in conservation farming and agricultural practices that would be environmentally friendly.
Project Coordinator of GASIP, Roy Ayariga, in his presentation on how the initiative works, said the project would benefit about 40,000 farmers across the country and address challenges facing the agricultural sector including bad roads, lack of finance for farmers and poor warehousing facilities.
Ghana Agriculture Sector Investment Programme (GASIP) is a sector wide national framework designed to support agri-business development in Ghana. It is a programme of the Government of Ghana supported by the International Fund for Agric Development (IFAD) and implemented by the Ministry of Food and Agriculture (MOFA).
With its sector wide approach, GASIP provides opportunity for all stake holders to review the programme every three years to inform the next phase of activities.
