The Chief Executive Officer of the Chamber of Agribusiness Ghana, Farmer Anthony Morrison has stated that the implementation of Electronic Levy (E-Levy) will limit the availability of food on the market in many cities across the country.
He said, though, experts say the E-Levy will create jobs and boost the country’s economy; it will affect the agric sector negatively because there will be no electronic transactions between traders and farmers.
The chamber of Agribusiness still holds the view that the E-levy will be detrimental to the effort and gains that have been made in the agricultural sector especially in the aggregation of food in the rural areas.
The major reason is that there is no protectionism from the security services while carrying a lot of money moving from one village to another paying for 10, 20, 100 bags in order to aggregate enough food to convey a full load of a truck to the major cities.
In the absence of these people using momo, it is impossible for the aggregators to carry huge sums of money along. What they do previously is that they load the money on their phones and pay the farmers when they get to the farm.
“This is going to prohibit the availability of food on the market, we will not be able to buy enough food from the rural areas so farmers are going to face some challenges. The other challenge is people who stay in Accra and send money to farmers through mobile money transactions to send them farm products would not be able to do so again because rural folks stand against mobile money transactions.
Even before the E-levy, we had it tough convincing them to accept mobile money as a mode of payment. Now that there is some form of tax payment on mobile money transactions, it will deter them from patronizing completely. These are some of the challenges we are going to face. People will be forced to carry money on them giving an opportunity to armed robbers which will go a long way to affect the food market in the cities, currently, there is an increase in food prices already”, he explained.
According to him, there are other means government can use to generate revenue for the county which E-Levy is not an option.
“If the government really needs taxes, the government should recruit more youth, train them to be able to use them as tax collectors across the country both day and night. Whenever each person collects the tax, he is entitled to 20% or 30% of the amount collected. This is been done in the UK that how the UK collect 90% of their taxes and if we are able to do this; more jobs will be created and more revenues would be generated as compared to what E-Levy will give us”.
Adding that, E-Levy will struggle the digitalization, and financial inclusion, and several intended people will develop ways not to pay this tax.
Farmer Anthony Morrison urged the government to heist the implementation of E-Levy and adopt a long-term sustainable strategy towards revenue collection and tax payment.
