The Ghana Civil-Society Cocoa Platform (GCCP) commends the Ghana Cocoa Board for its bold initiative of implementing a floor price and a living income differential (LID) aimed at improving farmer’s standard of living. The platform recognizes the massive significance of this initiative and its invaluable impact on the livelihood of cocoa farmers and therefore applauds COCOBOD and its counterparts in Cote d’Ivoire for this bold initiative.
The 2020 edition of the Livestock, Poultry, and Fisheries Training Tradeshow (LiPF) has been slated for September 25th and 26th, 2020. The event that will have the United States Department for Agriculture’s (USDA’s) Ghana Poultry Project (GPP) playing the lead role in training, showcases and promotes the Livestock, Poultry, and fisheries production value chain in Ghana.
It is the sector given the least support; it is the sector with the highest number of the aging workforce; it is the one that is least attractive to the youth.
Mr. Dela Gadzanku, the Volta/Eastern Chair of the Association of Ghana Industries (AGI), has said the interest of the youth in entrepreneurial opportunities remained weak despite government and stakeholder efforts.
Last year 2019, The President, Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, launched the Rearing for Food and Jobs (RFJ) programme in Wa in the Upper West Region.
The Market Oriented Agriculture Programme (MOAP) in North West Ghana, has provided rice parboiling training techniques for 35 women in the Upper West Region to help improve the quality of parboiling rice produce to access markets and better prices.
Africa was already facing food insecurity and agricultural underdevelopment prior to COVID-19. In 2018 studies showed that Sub-Saharan Africa was the world’s most food-insecure region, hosting 239 million undernourished population. Although many African countries are proactive in boosting agricultural production and protecting their food supply by raising crop productivity and reducing their sensitivity to weather conditions, it is clear that COVID-19 will derail these processes.
Rice farmers at Fumbisi in the Builsa South District of the Upper East Region are appealing to the government to support them with combined harvesters to harvest their rice this year.
Anytime, the topics of low income and worsening livelihood of cocoa farmers are raised in Ghana, people mistakenly assume Ghana to be the cocoa farmer and thus they argue that Ghana needs to add value to its cocoa beans to improve its farmers’ livelihoods.
Food security according to the UN’s Committee on World Food Security means that all people, at all times, have physical, social, and economic access to sufficient, safe, and nutritious food that meets their food preferences and dietary needs for an active and healthy life. The major threats to food security are Climate change, Population growth, rising food prices, and Post-harvest losses. About 805 million people are not food secured and the majority of these are in developing countries, whereas Ghana belongs.
