Agric budget to stifle crop production

Peasant farmers in Ghana have criticised the 2015 budgetary allocation made to the agriculture sector, describing it as inadequate and with the potential to stifle the crop production sub-sector.

After careful analysis of the 2015 budget statement, the farmers observed that “ the 2015 budget has no prospects for crop production in the country. The allocation is inadequate to implement the planned programme for 2015. The agric sector is completely being underfunded.”

These and other observations were made in Accra yesterday at a civil society 2015 agricultural budget analysis workshop jointly organised by the Peasant Farmers Association Ghana (PFAG) and SEND-Ghana. It was financially supported by Oxfam and OSIWA. The workshop brought together civil society groups, farmer-based organisations, smallholder farmers, extension agents, the media, among others.

In an address, the National President of the PFAG, Mr Mohammed Abdul Rahman, said the workshop was meant to analyse the budgetary allocation for the agricultural sector of the economy and to enable farmers hold the government accountable. Mr Abdul Rahman lamented that the fertilizer subsidy had remained questionable as those who were supposed to receive the fertilizer were not receiving it.

He appealed to the government to look at the loopholes in the fertilizer subsidy programme and address them head on.

The Programme Officer-in-charge of Trade and Agriculture at SEND-Ghana, Mr Daniel Adotey raised concern about the disinterest in the crop sub-sector. Mr Adotey told Public Agenda that “we should be interested in engineering growth in the crop sector, in livestock sector and the fisheries sector. If we have growth in these three sub-sectors, we will be addressing the issue of food security and nutrition in this country.

Mr Adotey pointed out that for now the country was not producing enough to feed its people, a situation which suggests that smallholder farmers were not producing enough for the purposes of getting income. He added: “We are saying that if we want to address food security, our growth in agriculture should be accounted for by the crop sub-sector, livestock and fisheries, rather than forestry and logging.”

According to him, the projected growth of the crop sub-sector in the 2015 budget was not ambitious enough, arguing that it would not be able to address the issue of food security in the country. “The projected growth in the crop subsector is 3.2%. Currently, the crop sub-sector grew by 3.6%. So in 2015 we are expecting a lesser growth than we have achieved. Are we going up as a country, or we are coming down. We think that it will not address the challenges relating to food security, nutrition and income of small-holder farmers across the country. And as a country, we should be progressing instead of retrogressing in terms of our performance in the crop sector,” he emphasised.