IFAD President calls on President Kufuor

Accra, Nov.17, GNA - President John Agyekum Kufuor on Monday said the establishment of President's Special Initiatives (PSI) on some agricultural produce was to encourage farmers to increase productivity, ensure efficient agricultural practices and better prices for their produce.

Crops earmarked for the PSI are cassava, cashew, cotton and oil palm. President Kufuor said this when Mr Lennart Bage, the visiting President of the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) called on him at the Castle, Osu.

Mr Bage is on a three-day visit to Ghana as part of the 25th anniversary celebration of IFAD.

He said under the concept agriculture would be modernised through mechanisation and effective extension services, marketing and stabilisation of prices of agricultural produce as a measure to reduce the rural-urban drift by the youth as a result of the previous methods of farming.

President Kufuor commended IFAD for its tremendous support to the agriculture sector and pledged that the Government would ensure that all resources provided by the organisation would be well utilised to benefit the people.

Mr Bage said for the past two decades that IFAD had been in Ghana, it had assisted rural dwellers to generate more income from their agriculture ventures. He said the relationship between IFAD and the Government had been very cordial.

IFAD, a United Nations financial agency established in Ghana since 1983 had financed 12 major projects, disbursed more than 36 million dollars in rural areas and in addition made available 26 million dollars under the Highly Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) Initiative.