The Ministry of Food and Agriculture (MoFA) has stepped up efforts to mobilise up to two million farmers onto the Planting for Food and Jobs (PFJ) programme for the 2021 farming season.

Currently, 1.7 million farmers have been registered under the programme, and the drive to increase farmer participation is to boost general agricultural production in the country.

Additionally, the ministry also wants to improve maize production to 3.2 million Metric Tonnes (MT) in 2021 from the 1.8 million MT produced at the start of the programme in 2017.

The Minister of Food and Agriculture, Dr Owusu Afriyie Akoto, said the ministry was focused on consolidating the gains of the last four years of the programme and to expand it into a bigger enterprise.

“In the coming years, the aim is to consolidate what we achieved over the years and to expand it to benefit more farmers,” he told the Daily Graphic in Accra.

“Basically, what we are saying is that we are doing more of the same but in a more intensified and an extensive way to bring in all farmers in Ghana in all the modules,” he said.

Modules

The PFJ has five modules, each of them with different gestation periods and the minister said the flagship programme had been a “huge success”.

The various modules under the programme are the staple crop, generally referred to as the Planting for Food and Jobs, the Rearing for Food and Jobs, Planting for Export and Rural Development (PERD), the Greenhouse Village for Vegetables and Mechanisation, which covers simple to huge farm implements.

Dr Akoto said under the staple crop module, production of maize, rice and soya bean had been impressive, citing for instance that from 1.8 million MT of maize produced before the PFJ, “we were able to touch three million metric tonnes in 2019.

“Had it not been the severe drought which occurred in the southern part of this country in 2020, we were hoping that we would have gone to 3.2 million MT,” the minister stated.

He said with the increase in food crop production, the country had become a maize trading centre in the sub-region, where neighbouring countries were coming to take the surplus stock away.

Tree crop module

Dr Akoto described the PERD as historical and a major intervention “that we are trying to diversify away from the over-reliance on cocoa; not with one or two crops, but with seven selected crops.

“We are talking about coconut, we are talking about oil palm, rubber, mango, coffee, cashew and shea,” he said, adding that although it might sound too ambitious, the target was to earn as much as cocoa was earning in foreign exchange for the country.

He said each of the tree crops was expected to earn about $2.5 billion in the next eight years, adding that an authority already approved by Parliament had been set up with the headquarters in Kumasi.

Dr Akoto explained that currently, the ministry was waiting for the seed money for the takeoff of the authority.