Opoku Gakpo Writes: Why Promise Of A Green Revolution Post Dec. 7 Election Is A Hoax

I will want to begin with a ‘shout out’ to all our hard working farmers for their extraordinary role in helping us keep body, soul, and spirit together all year round. Despite the numerous troubles of your daily lives and tough-talking politicians ‘throwing you under the bus’ more often than they lift you up, you remain unperturbed, unshaken and optimistic about what the future holds for you and your children. You still manage to lift yourselves up every morning with renewed spirits, clean up your sweat with wipes that look no better than the leaves on your farms and get back to tilling the soil knowing that the lives of your families and our country depend on your work.

We are days away from what is probably the ‘noisiest’ election of my lifetime. This is the third election that will see me take a seat in the front row as a key follower of pre-election campaigning and a qualified voter. And if you’ve been paying attention over the years like I have, you will realize that a lot of what you are seeing and hearing today, you have seen and heard before ahead of previous elections. Sometimes with a little tweaking of the texts, other times said in a lot more passionate tone, but most of the times cast in the exact words you heard them four or eight years ago.

Now let’s talk about the Agric focused plans and policies of our major political parties for the next four years as we go into the December 7 election. A sector which’s condition breaks my heart because it is hard to come to terms with why although more than 55 percent of our population are engaged in farming, one in every five children under five years suffers from malnutrition, and we still spend $1.5 billion every year importing food (sadly, foods that we produce enough of or have the right environment and capacity to produce enough of in this country). I have been following the policy discussions ahead of the polls but I’m yet to be convinced that anything will change by the time the next election cycle is due in 2020.

Is a Green Revolution coming?
I am amazed that more than 50 years after the popularly christened “Green Revolution” transformed agricultural production across the world at a remarkably admirable pace, those two words have found their way back into political manifestos in 21^st Century Ghana, virtually cast in the same old ‘impossible to crash’ fashion. The ideas around transforming agriculture have changed all over the world but ours haven’t. It’s as if our country has stood still despite changing times, no one has grown older or smarter, no fresh food production challenges have emerged, the environment has not deteriorated, nor has our population grown.

So, more than half of the country’s workforce is currently engaged in agriculture for their livelihood as small-scale farmers. But we still have political leaders promising to make the Agric sector attractive to the youth if they win power against the counsel of Central University Chancellor Rev. Dr. Mensa Otabil. Dr Otabil said in church the other day, "I believe that a nation should not be encouraging everybody to be farmers. I don't think we need more than 5% of Ghanaians as farmers. All we need to do is to do it well so a few people can produce for all of us.” The politicians’ promise to attract more young people into farming is clearly a rhetoric from many years ago they keep spitting out repeatedly without thinking through it.

Now, academics basically describe the ‘Green Revolution’ as various technology transfer initiatives including the application of chemicals like fertilizers to agriculture, mechanization and breeding of high yielding crop varieties between the 1950s and 1970s that exponentially increased food production and saved many from hunger. The governing party in its manifesto says “the NDC Government will launch a “Green Revolution” aimed at doubling the output of staple crops, particularly grains and tubers by 2025… The goal will be driven by facilitating the acquisition of land banks to support commercial agriculture activities; introducing high-yielding, disease-resistant seeds…; Making the most efficient use of existing irrigation facilities…; and using GIS to map out soil structures and their chemical composition for the various MMDAs to support districts and, where appropriate, regional specialization in staple food production.”

Come to think of it. Ghana’s forest reserve currently stands at about 1 million hectares compared to about 100 years ago, when it was more than 8 million hectares. This sharp degradation has mainly been the result of several human activities including farming. So which other more lands does government plan to clear to support commercial Agric activities? Haven’t we cleared enough forests already? Of course, we need improved seeds. But every year, the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) releases tens of improved varieties of our major staples onto the market. What would change with what the NDC is promising us? They don’t tell us.

Make efficient use of existing irrigation facilities? Which facilities are we talking about here? Next year will be 40 years since the Ghana Irrigation Development Authority was set up with the sole mandate to “formulate, develop and implement irrigation and drainage plans for all year round agriculture production in Ghana.” The proudest achievement of the authority is that less than 10 percent of farms in the country are irrigated. The rest continue to rely on rain-fed agriculture. So which irrigation facilities will be made more efficient? Now we want to map soils for regional specialization of crops beyond 2016. As if we don’t know already which parts of the country are good for which crops? ‘Green Revolution’ is coming indeed.

Then, there is the NPP’s manifesto which doesn’t do us much good either. It talks about increasing subsidies on fertilizers, seeds, and agro chemicals; implementing block farming, setting up schemes to attract youth into farming and so on. And then the famous “one village, one dam policy.” Has anyone on their agric team bothered to find out why the famous revived Aveyime Irrigation Project in the Tongu area of the Volta Region is collapsing despite the farming communities sitting right beside the River Volta which has more than enough water to flood all farms in West Africa all year round? Associated costs like the price of electricity to pump the water have made the project so unsustainable that farmers are forced to rather leave their crops at the mercy of the weather than rely on it. Most likely because no one thought through that idea of reviving the scheme a bit more carefully before implementing it.

The missing link
Over the last three years, in my line of duty, I have had the honour of touring all four corners of this country to speak to ordinary farmers about what the challenges they face are. I think that is an important point to make because in the words of Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, “if you want the real stories, you have to go to where people live”. That is where you get the best sense of how people are thinking and how they are doing. And I can report that the biggest challenge farmers point out they face above all the others remains getting their produce to the market at competitive prices which they can raise a family on. Like in Mafi Adikpe in the Central Tongu District where more than half of all the cassava they produce every year rots. http://www.myjoyonline.com/business/2016/March-14th/lack-of-processing-equipment-causing-cassava-loss-in-central-tongu-district.php

Just yesterday, I met a farmer from the Savelugu District in the Northern Region who told me he has more than 250 bags of rice that he produced two years ago with a GH¢17,000 cedis loan from the Export Development and Investment Fund (EDIF), stuck in his warehouse with no market for them. And a lot of those who have these heart-wrenching stories to tell are not far away rural people. They are our neighbours and family friends. Including the husband of the woman you buy tomato from in the market; the father of your favourite kenkey seller who despite her high level of intelligence has to hawk on the street to survive because daddy’s earnings as a fisherman could not support her secondary education; and probably, that foot soldier who will not mind killing himself to ensure NDC or NPP wins power. In fact, this country loses more than $400 million annually through post-harvest losses, mostly at the farm gates, so you can imagine how many such farmers are suffering because of the absence of a market for their produce.

Fixing this problem requires more than just constructing additional roads and building processing factories and establishing storage facilities. These constitute scratches on the surface of the problem, not fixing it. What is needed is a well thought through, government initiated, private sector led policy that would encourage the springing up of well-established produce marketing companies that will buy foodstuff from farmers at fair prices and either sell them to urban residents, processing companies or export them. That’s all you need to do.

Make no mistake, agriculture is lucrative. This is evident by how food prices continue to soar in this country with passing time. But farmers who produce the food remain poor because the middlemen and processors and everyone else know how to milk the system for better returns, except the farmer. Once the farmer starts getting good money for his labour, you don’t have to give him fertilizer subsidy, he will buy it himself. You don’t have to import tractors for him, he will have enough money to rent or buy one. You don’t have to set up a ‘Youth in Agric’ Program and channel resources ‘opaquely’ through there unaccountably. The youth will go into farming on their own because they know ‘you will earn your crust when it’s all done.’ This idea is not new. It is the same philosophy that has driven the popularity of both small and big businesses across this country for decades. From the “communications center operators” to the “space-space vendors” to the springing up of banks in every nook and cranny of this country.

It’s the same idea behind the Ghana Commodity Exchange project which President John Mahama himself launched earlier this year and both parties’ manifestos mention briefly, but unfortunately, looks like they have abandoned the idea in their campaigning for more flowery promises of goodies which they think will rather draw the votes. Political expediency, you may call it. Unless that difficulty with the lack of market and fair prices for farmers’ produce is fixed, no other intervention will matter. We may well forget that a so-called ‘green revolution’ is coming from 2017. It will be a hoax for a long time to come. May God bless our farmers. And bless our homeland Ghana.

By Joseph Opoku Gakpo