Small farmers to be bigger under GAWU

The new national executives of the General Agricultural Workers Union (GAWU) of Ghana TUC has strongly signaled that it is seriously going to improve on the mobilization of small farmers and other rural agricultural workers to the extent that they would be able to enroll about two million such members into the union. With Mr S. Nyame Yeboah as the new Chairman and Mr Kingsley Offei-Nkansah as the General Secretary, the union is thus urging all its current members to forge harder in their efforts to organize the seemingly difficult to mobilize small farmers These executives hope to achieve this before the end of their four-year term of office which began on January 18, 2008 after being elected at the 8th Quadrennial Delegates Conference at Kwadaso, Kumasi. The conference was on the Organising for Change ? The Role of the Rural Worker.?

Speaking to the press at the end of the conference, Mr Nyame-Yeboah called on members of the union to regard it as both an individual and collective task to help in bringing these informal workers into the fold of the union otherwise these poor farmers would continue to suffer in silence without any one to speak for them, either about their conditions of work, or to protest against militating government policies, or unfair trade deals both internally and externally.

Mr Nyame Yeboah said that though agricultural remains the mainstay of the Ghanaian economy employing a majority of people, the vast majority of agriculture workers earn below one US dollar per day while the incidence of poverty is highest among such workers, in addition to high illiteracy and ignorance.

Against this background, GAWU?s task of championing the cause of these farmers is going to be more difficult, more so in terms of the newly signed Economic Partnership Agreements (EPAs), which is further going to worsen the already deprived livelihoods of these small farmers.

The peasant farmers and other rural workers that the union seeks to represent do not have access to the basic necessities of life such as water, basic health services and electricity, plus many of them that die from snake bites and preventable diseases, and sometimes even face death from extreme hunger and deprivation.

The GAWU chairman however noted that GAWU is undaunted despite the myriad problems faced by these famers and is optimistic that the union is positioned to become the voice of these millions of voiceless farmers. Already the union has been able to organise farmers in the cocoa sector and tree growers, plus others including landless peasants, tenant farmers, artisanal fishermen, tractor operators, and small irrigation farmers.

For his part, Mr Offei-Nkansah also hinted of a stronger direction towards the informal agricultural workers as epitomized in the theme of the quadrennial delegates. However, to do so, one of the first things that he will like to pay attention to is to inject quality into the institutional arrangements and mechanisms of the union that is needed as essential tools to deliver on their programs.

The union has adopted four programme areas, namely, Rights in Work, Sustainable Agriculture and Rural Development, Institutional Development and Empowerment, and Policy Advocacy and Campaign Programmes, that comprises food security, trade and agriculture, which according to him would be linked them up with the traditional trade union concerns of Collective Bargaining.

GAWU was established on 5th February 1959 out of a merger of five smaller agricultural trade unions on the basis of the Industrial Relations Act of 1958. The union had the initial name of Union of General Agricultural Workers (UGAW) and later renamed GAWU.

The General Secretary emphasized that GAWU is stepping up the oraganisation of small farmers, because their traditional membership in the formal agriculture sector tend to have one foot in small farmer communities as they sometimes loose their jobs and go into farming to maintain their livelihood: Moreover, many of these formal members do farming on the side to raise supplementary income due to their predominant operation in the rural areas, ?We think that in organising small farmers and assisting them to improve their conditions of livelihood, in terms of their day to day operation, we?d also be mobilising them to appreciate the difficulties that are impacting on them that are arising as a result of negative policies and together work to influence policy positively,? Mr Offei-Nkansah stated.

Small farmers are really suffering as a result of the market economy and liberalisation policies being practised on a wholesale manner. He elaborated that small farmers are in so much difficulty that it is inconceivable to deal with these difficulties without organising them.

The union, the general secretary said, is confident that GAWU shall succeed as it has been at this effort for a while, though the challenges in the first ten years of this mobilisation were mammoth with many ups and downs. But the union has chalked more progress over the last 3-4 years due to consistency in efforts, follow ups on initiatives and also linking the day to day needs of small farmers around extension, inputs, markets and government policy. Again, because it is more tasking and more demanding to organise small farmers around the regions, GAWU has made more progress through collaborations with other Civil Society Organisations (CSOs).

Another focus of Mr Offei-Nkansah is to review the level of Collective Bargaining negotiations in relation to agricultural enterprises. According to him, there is a lot that trade unions can do to enhance collective bargaining particularly as they operate in new labour act environment.

He observed that the environment of the bargaining mechanisms are all the different things that are happening in agric enterprises and all the different things that are happening to agric enterprises as a result of varying policies relating to government, agriculture, interest rate, and finance policy; these policies affect agriculture industry, and the mobilisation of national savings and capital for agriculture development.

?Therefore, agriculture enterprises have fortunes that may be undermined or facilitated as a result of policy, and when they are facilitated, it makes it easier for the union to negotiate better conditions of service, but where policy constricts the activities of such enterprises then the constraints at the enterprise level makes it more difficult for the union to negotiate better,? he said.

Other fresh national executives of the union that would help in achieving these objectives are Mr Emmanuel Avuyem as 1st Vice Chairman, 2nd Vice Chairman Victoria Alambire, Mr Edward Kereweh Deputy General Secretary, Mr Ohene Nkansah, 1st Trustee and Mad. Felicia Kpordzro as 2nd Trustee. The previous Chairman was Mr Adongo while Mr Samuel Kangah served as former Gen. Secretary. But the election of these officers was very dramatic especially as Mr Kangah was seeking re-election for his fourth term as the Gen. Secretary after serving 12 years. However, he surprisingly stepped down at the last minute paving way for Mr Offei-Nkansah as the only candidate for the post. Some of the highlights of Mr Kangah?s leadership were to correct western press negative propaganda that Ghana was using children on cocoa farms, but in-depth research commissioned by the union proved this to be false