NEW INITIATIVE AIMED AT IMPROVING AGRICULTURAL POLICIES AND INCREASING PRODUCTIVITY LAUNCHED IN GHANA

Newly launched Policy Hubs and Policy Nodes program aims at spurring a green revolution in Ghana through the development and implementation of progressive agricultural policies targeted at smallholder farmers.

Accra (15 March, 2011): A new initiative aimed at developing a strong policy support system in Ghana to drive the country towards the attainment of a green revolution was launched in Accra today by the Ministry of Food and Agriculture, in collaboration with the Alliance for Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA).

The newly established Ghana Policy Nodes and Country Hub program — the first of its kind in Africa — aims to develop progressive national agricultural policies in order to raise productivity, increase household incomes and assure household and national food security.

The programme aims to ensure accelerated and sustained adoption of agricultural technologies by smallholder farmers thereby resulting in increased yields and earnings. Activities will be implemented by Policy Action Nodes and Country Policy Hubs with strong technical and advocacy support from the AGRA Policy Team.

Specific objectives of the Ghana Policy nodes and country hub include: Improving seed policies in order to increase adoption of crop varieties; Improving policies for adoption of soil health technologies; Expanding national and regional markets and trade for staple food crops; Securing land and property rights to accelerate investment in sustainable soil, land and water management technologies, and enhancing environmental sustainability of technological interventions. A similar programme will be implemented in other countries across Africa including Ethiopia, Mali, Mozambique and Tanzania.

The Ghana Policy Action node is a group of existing policy institutions that have technical expertise and commit to work together to address policy bottlenecks in particular policy priority areas. These institutions jointly map out ways and agree on deadlines to deal with policy bottlenecks identified. Each node will have a node coordinator to coordinate the activities of the node. Policy hubs, on the other hand, are a loose network of Policy Action Nodes. Each hub will have a coordinator who will liaise with all the constituent nodes. This is important to ensure harmonization of policy messages for consistency and clarity.

Dr. Akinwumi Adesina, Vice President for Policy and Partnerships at AGRA said the main objective of the new initiative was to address constraints in existing agricultural polices with a view to developing new progressive policies that drive change to scale.

“The policy support systems for farmers are broken in Africa. The structural adjustment programs of the 1980s put Africa backwards by at least three decades, as they dismantled all the institutions and support systems around farmers in Africa” he said. “Today, majority of farmers do not have access to functioning extension systems, affordable credit, stable prices or markets. As a result less than 5% of farmers in Ghana use improved varieties of maize and fertilizer use averages 8 kilograms per hectare”.

Each Policy Node will include the major key stakeholders that work along that specific policy-action value chain. For example, a seed policy action node will work closely with plant breeders, seed regulatory institutions, plant quarantine experts, private and public seed companies, farmers associations and seed policy experts.

Dr. Adesina said said that in the wake of huge donor support cuts, Africa must look within itself and find resources to achieve the Green Revolution. He said Africa has the technology to drive this change, and cited development of new varieties of staple crops that have significantly reduced risks/vulnerabilities farmers faced, and raised and stabilized yields.

“The main challenge of turning this potential into impacts in Africa is lack of appropriate policies to drive change to scale,” he said adding: “Asia not only got the technologies right, they also got the policies right. The green revolution fed over a billion people, lowered the price of food for the urban and rural poor, created employment and spurred the rapid economic growth now being witnessed in Asia.”

He acknowledged that the green revolution must also be driven by a financial revolution for agriculture and decisive action by governments to address climate change. AGRA has spearheaded several initiatives with other financial institutions to provide loans to millions of farmers Africa.

The Minister for food and Agriculture, Honorable Kwesi Ahwoi, said that the Ghanaian government is convinced that a “comprehensive support to rebuild local policy institutions, support evidence-based policies, connect policy analysts to policy makers, engage agricultural parliamentary committees to interact with policy analysts, and to promote policy advocacy platforms will strongly transform policies into implementations”. This, he said, is also consistent with AGRA's objective of ensuring agricultural transformation in Africa in general and Ghana in particular.

AGRA's programs and partnerships in Ghana targets major obstacles faced by smallholder farmers. AGRA works to improve farmers' access to good seed, fertilizer, and sustainable farming practices; to credit; to crop storage; to markets; and to build strong farmer-based organizations.

AGRA works in 13 African countries at the moment. They are Ghana, Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, Tanzania, Kenya, Malawi, Mali, Mozambique, Niger, Nigeria, Uganda and Zambia.

AGRA is an Africa based organization working in partnership with governments, agricultural research organizations, farmers, private sector, civil society and other rural development stakeholders to significantly and sustainably improve the productivity and incomes of resource poor farmers in Africa. AGRA's programs in the areas of seeds, soil health, market viability, supportive policies and innovative finance work to bring about transformational change across the agricultural value chain. Funded initially by the Rockefeller Foundation and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, AGRA is chaired by Kofi Annan and has offices in Nairobi, Kenya and Accra, Ghana. For more information, please visit: www.agra-alliance.org