President Kufuor lauds efforts to revamp health and agriculture

President John Agyekum Kufuor on Tuesday expressed confident about his government's track record to augment the health and agriculture sectors to boost national development.

He said the Ministry of Food and Agriculture was concentrating on mechanization of agriculture, food marketing, storage and processing to save the country from "a year of plenty, only to be followed by lean years."

The rehabilitation and expansion of irrigation schemes around the country will also continue steadily, he assured a cross-section of people who attended a People's Assembly organized by the government in Accra as part of the celebration of one decade of the Fourth Republic and two years of positive change.

The People's Assembly, which offered the electorate the opportunity to interact with the Executive on pertinent national issues was on the theme: "consolidating Ghana's democracy through peace, unity and development."

President Kufuor said his administration had embarked on a programme aimed at boosting the morale of teachers and their conditions of service. He said training facilities were being expanded to upgrade the skills of teachers to enable them keep up with the new trends around the world.

The President said the provision of desks and basic textbooks to primary schools would soon be completed. "We will then be able to say truly that every school child has a desk to sit on and material to study." Work, he said, has started on the project to upgrade at least one second-cycle school in every region.