The General Agriculture Workers Union (GAWU) has called on the government to elaborate steps for phase two of the Planting for Food and Jobs initiative, which was projected in the 2023 mid-year review.
Mr. Edward Kareweh, Secretary GAWU, said the details were needed for stakeholders in the agricultural sector to be abreast of the exact plans because the focus on the input credit system, storage and distribution infrastructure, commodity trading, and digitized platform was not well understood.
He told the Ghana News Agency in an interview that although phase two sought to eliminate the subsidy on fertilizers “If you talk about the credit system, the subsidy, which was 50 percent from the beginning, is also an input credit system because not all of the input was given to the farmers for free; they were paying part of it, and they are gradually fading out the subsidy”.
He said the issue of storage and distribution structure was not new because it had been ongoing, with some of them only needing to be completed for usage.
Mr. Kareweh added that the government’s distribution infrastructure was also unclear as to whether it wanted to construct the deplorable roads, leading to the various farms in the country or build storage facilities in all farming communities.
Touching on commodity trading, he said, “Is it that you want to create a market? That is what we have always told the government to do, but in many cases, they said no because the school feeding programme would source the foodstuffs from the farmers, but we’re all here and we hear of the shortages that occur at the schools.”
He lamented that some of the foodstuffs given to schools to feed the students were imported, which did not correlate with what the government planned to do.
The Secretary of GAWU said the farmers did not have the necessary tools needed for production, hence the digitised system being commented on by the government was not a priority.
