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03.10.2015 Business & Finance

Stakeholders crucial for Ghana attaining rice strategy-Minister

By GNA
Stakeholders crucial for Ghana attaining rice strategy-Minister
03.10.2015 LISTEN

Accra, Oct. 3, GNA - Dr Ahmed Yakubu Alhassan, Deputy Minister of Agriculture (Crops) says the roles of government and other stakeholders are very crucial for the attainment of the goals of the National Rice Development Strategy (NRDS).

These, he said would enable Ghana to double rice production by 2018.

Dr Alhassan said through the Ministry of Food and Agriculture (MoFA) revised NRDS in February, an implementation plan would be developed to indicate the action plans and funding for the strategy.

The Minister was speaking ahead of a national workshop which was sponsored by the John Agyekum Kufuor (JAK) Foundation for stakeholders, policy makers and officials of MoFA in Accra to validate the NRSD to make it a government document and serve as a source of reference.

NRDS was an outcome of government subscription to the vision of the Coalition for Africa Rice Development (CARD) initiative to double rice production in Africa.

CARD was born following the fourth Tokyo international Conference on African Development in May 2008.

The NRSD formulated in 2009 and revised in 2015 and coving 2008 to 2018 was a response to forestall the effects of the global food crisis, which proposes to double rice production taking into consideration the comparative production capacities of the three major ecologies, rainfed upland coving 12per cent of arable area, rainfed lowland covering 78 per cent and irrigated; 10 per cent.

The strategy is also aimed at addressing the challenges of low agriculture production, by focusing on some of the bottlenecks along the rice value chain which hitherto has inhibited the growth of the rice industry.

Some thematic areas to be critically looked at include; seed system, fertilizer marketing and distribution system, harvesting access and maintenance system research and technology dissemination, community mobilisation, farmer-based organisation and credit management system, as well as monitoring and evaluation.

Based on population growth rate alone, current demand of about 500,000 tons per year would increase to about 600,000 tons per year by 2015.

However, taking both population and increase in per capita consumption together, rice demand would increase to 1,680,000 tons per year by the same period.

Currently, statistics indicate that the country is about 56 per cent self-sufficient in rice production which means that government's efforts in improving local rice industry is being realised.

Mr Baffour Agyeman-Duah, Chief Executive Officer of the JAK Foundation, said Ghana spends four to five million dollars to import rice but is capable of achieving self sufficiency in rice production and MoFA must see to the improvement of production.

Mr Twumasi Ankrah, Co-ordinator of Rice Sector Project said the issue of value chain in the various projects needs to be looked at as well as infrastructural development in the area of irrigation.

GNA

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