The intervention, which covers 25 various projects including agriculture, forms part of the Republic of Korea's aim to strengthen the economic and bilateral relations between them and Ghana Korea.The South Korean Ambassador to Ghana, Kyong Sig Park, made this known at a ground-breaking ceremony and opening of an Agricultural Official Development

Assistance (ODA) Desk held at Dawhenya in the Greater Accra Region on Friday, as part of the ongoing K-Ricebelt Programme. It was jointly organised by the Ministry of Agriculture, Food, And Rural Affairs (MAFRA) of Korea and the Ministry of Food And Agriculture (MoFA), of Ghana. 

K-Ricebelt project

Ghana, Senegal, Guinea, Gambia, Cameroun, Kenya, Uganda, Guinea-Bissau, Cote d’Ivoire, and Sierra Leone, with Ghana’s project serving as the lead country, are benefiting from a South Korean developmental initiative as a swift response to the danger over food security in Africa by helping these countries to increase rice production and reduce their reliance on imports.

Known as the K-Ricebelt project, it is aimed at providing small farmers in the beneficiary countries with resilient rice varieties to combat the challenges posed by the climate crisis.  It is the Republic of Korea’s ODA project aimed at contributing to achieving zero hunger in Africa by building rice seed production complexes in African countries to produce high-yielding rice seeds and supplying them to farmers.

As part of the effort to streamline communication with the Ghanaian government, MAFRA has established an Agricultural ODA Desk in Ghana to manage the K-Ricebelt programme comprehensively and also provide and acquire improved support in times of need.

The ground-breaking ceremony was attended by the Deputy Minister of Food and Agriculture in charge of Crops, Yaw Frimpong Addo;  the Ambassador of Korea to Ghana, Kyong Sig Park; the Director of MAFRA, Sang Jun Lee; the Executive Director of Korea Rural Community Corporation (KRC), Park Tae Sun; the Chief Director of MoFA, Paul Siameh, the Acting Chief Executive of the Ghana Irrigation Development Authority (GIDA), Richard Oppong-Boateng, among other dignitaries.

Ambassador Park said Ghana had a bright future for food sustainability and expressed the hope that the latest intervention would contribute to achieving food security.

For his part, Mr Addo said about 50 per cent of rice consumed in Ghana was imported adding that the intervention to boost rice seeds production in Ghana would go a long way to increase local consumption of rice as the seeds would be readily available to farmers under the project.

The Director of MAFRA, Sang Jun Lee, said the K-Ricebelt was aimed at improving the food security of African countries that consumed rice leveraging the Korean experience and agricultural policy.

The event also marked the beginning of construction works on 100 hectares of land for a rice seed cultivation complex at Dawhenya.  The project of increasing agricultural productivity through irrigation infrastructure modernisation has three main objectives, namely establishing a rice seed cultivation complex through modernisation of the irrigation infrastructure and consolidation of the farmland, production of high-yielding rice seeds from the established cultivation complex and increasing farming household income and alleviate poverty in rural areas.

To achieve these goals, the project follows a set of five components that comprise the scope of work. These are land development, provision of equipment, dispatch of Korean experts to supervise the project, invitational training programme in Korea, as well as capacity building and training workshops in Ghana.

The project was officially launched on November 2, 2023, following the signing of a $ 7,800,000 grant agreement in May 2023 between the MAFRA of the Republic of Korea and the MoFA of Ghana, in tandem with the Korea Rural Community Corporation and the GIDA as the administrative implementation bodies for the project.