Banks urged to invest in agribusiness sector

The Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Glofert Limited, Reverend Foster Mawuli Benson, has called on banks to direct some of their investments into the agribusiness sector.
Glofert Company Limited is the biggest fertilizer blending company in Ghana.

was Rev Benson who was speaking to the Media after a programme at the International Fertilizer Development Centre at Asuboi in the Eastern Region said more banks needed to come in to support the indigenous companies to augment government’s efforts.
The event which was organized by IFDC was intended to give international training on how to produce and distribute balanced fertilizers for a better crop nutrition to small-scale farmers.

The five-day training was attended by 70 delegates from 25 countries across the world to learn on how they could better produce fertilizer to increase production.
Glorfert limited is the biggest fertilizer blending plant in Ghana now and blends 2,400 metric tons or 48,000 of 50 kilogrammes bags of blended fertilizers in a day.

The facility which started operations some two years ago, is one of the projects initiated under the One District, One Factory (1D1F) and is due for commissioning soon.
It has employed over 220 permanent and casual workers who are from nearby towns and communities in the district.

Rev. Benson said one of his outfit’s priorities was to be able to identify the problems that the farmers faced by putting in tailored measures fertilizer composition for them.
He said most of the farmers complained of low yields and indicated that the challenge could be the result of poor agronomic practices, wrong application of fertilizers and the use of only off the shelf fertilizers over the years.



‘‘We believe that the soil in Ghana is depleting of nutrient and there is the need to restock the soil with nutrient, but the only way we can be able to do that is to test the soil and blend the fertilizers specific to the soil needs’’ he stressed.
He said by this, fertilizer could be blended for every crop as each crop required certain nutrients to be able to give the maximum yield.

Rev Benson said with the coming of Glofert, it would scale down the importation of already blended fertilizers, adding that, if previously Ghana was importing everything blended, now there are in house companies that had the capacity to produce fertilizers to meet the special requirements of farmers.

Mr Patrice Annequin of IFDC, said his outfit would enlighten all stakeholders that farmers could not afford to use blanket fertilizers and there must be new ways to fine tune the requirement of the crops, depending on the soil so that farmers could get maximum yields from the use of fertilizers.

He explained that Ghana was at the forefront of the new approach by which they would provide the farmers with more suitable fertilizers to improve crop production.

He said Ghana has moved from the use of blanket fertilizer to balanced fertilizers, which is an indication that for the first time, farmers in Ghana would use different types of fertilizers depending on the crops and in which region they were producing the crops.