The Minister of State for Agriculture, Dr Nurah Gyeile has admitted that government’s flagship agricultural policy, ‘Planting for Food and Jobs’ has no implementation plan yet.
According to him, the idea for the implementation of the program has however been captured on a concept note in the interim while consultants work on the final implementation document.
His admission follows policy think tank, IMANI Africa’s report on the programme which listed various shortfalls with the current structure of the initiative including the lack of a clear implementation plan.
Dr Gyeile told Citi News that the consultants are currently developing the concept note into an implementation plan.
“The only thing [left] is the implementation plan. The idea we have, we have put it in a concept note. The concept notes we will develop the implementation plan in the media term.”
The ‘planting for food and jobs’ is one of the New Patriotic Party (NPP) government’s main policy plan it said it intends to roll out this year in its bid to revolutionalize the agricultural sector of the country.
As part of the program, enrolled farmers will benefit from farm inputs, fertilizers, improve crop seeds, among other resources to help them improve production and increase profit margins.
Although most farmer-groups believe the program has the potential of improving returns in the sector, they are uncertain about how the government intends to fully carry it out as a result of a non-existent program document to provide full details of the implementation.
Some groups have also cast doubt that the policy will succeed.
The Peasant Farmers Association of Ghana said it is not sure of the goverment’s ability to do a good job with the program. Among other challenges it has expressed, is the engagement of National Service personnel for extension services.
The Programme Officer for the Association, Charles Kwowe Nyaaba, in a Citi News interview said, “the approach of recruiting extension service personnel to help in the programme is wrong. If you go to the Ministry of Agriculture at the district level, you have the extension officers there who are not able to visit farming communities because of lack of logistics. You leave all these people hanging there and you say you are bringing National Service personnel to train them to go and train the farmers. At the end of the day, if you don’t take care, they would rather go and be learning from the farmers and that is not going to give us the impact that we are looking for.”
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