The Network of Commercial Agriculture Production (NETCAP), has expressed worry over the challenges facing the Agric sector in the country.
According to the group, the production capacities of commercial farmers will further be constrained next year, if measures are not put in place to avert these challenges.
The group at a media briefing mentioned the challenges to include, inadequate access to and high cost of fertilizers and other inputs such as high-yielding certified seeds and other chemicals, low market prices of some agricultural products notably soybeans as a result of the implementation of export restrictions of soybeans, high cost of credit and a lack of support from financial institutions to lend to the agriculture sector especially seasonal grain farming and high cost of machinery to enable the modernization and mechanization of agriculture.
Secretary of NETCAP, Mr. Joshua Toatoba, who addressed the media in Tamale indicated that though some pragmatic farmer-centered policies have been initiated and implemented by the government for the past years, there were still not sufficient to tame the tide of price increases.
“We are concerned that if these challenges are not addressed immediately, our production capacities will be further constrained next year, and that can derail all the gains we have made in recent years,” he said.
He said though NETCAP acknowledges the existence and implementation of some agricultural production enhancement interventions in the past, it is worth noting that most of these initiatives have not yielded the full results.
Adding that most of the interventions were developed with little or no involvement of key agricultural value chain stakeholders such as farmers, input dealers, aggregators, financial institutions, and processors. He said the implementation of these interventions has also been done without proper coordination of all the sub-sectors in agriculture, and other allied and adjacent sectors of the economy.
Mr Joshua further explained that NETCAP is aware government is in discussion with stakeholders to find solutions to our present economic challenges, including the challenges in the agriculture sector.
“We wish to caution the government to be wary of solutions that may set back the achievements we have made in the agriculture sector over the past several years. For instance, this year, some stakeholders advocated for the ban on the export of soybeans to make the crop available for local industries. Instead of a ban, the government implemented export restrictions on the soybean crop. The implementation of the temporary ban on soybean distorted the soybean market, making prices slump below the break-even level,” he stated.
The group in their statement also proposed four major interventions for the government to implement to address these challenges.
They include the expansion of the Fertilizer Subsidy Programme to include all farmers in the country instead of only smallholder farmers, expanding the fertilizer subsidy to cover other aspects of the farmers’ production such as improved high-yielding certified seeds, chemicals for plant protection, and agricultural machinery, and removing the export restrictions on soybeans to solve the problem of low prices and contribute to an increase in the flow of foreign currency into the country to help stabilize the local currency.
Others are the need for government to strengthen the capacity of new institutions such as Ghana Incentive-Based Risk-Sharing System for Agricultural Lending to help buy down the perceived risks involved with lending to the agriculture sector so that financial institutions would be encouraged to lend more to the agriculture sector, review the operations of the National Food Buffer Stock Company and provide it with the resources to provide guaranteed prices to cushion farmers against lower prices.
NETCAP is a group of about 200 large-scale commercial farmers who together cultivate more than 20,000 hectares (or 50,000 acres) of land producing maize, rice, and soybeans. In the 2021 cropping year, members of NETCAP collectively produced more than 80,000 metric tons of grain, most of which went to industrial firms in Ghana.
Story By: Alhassan Yakubu
