Planting for Foods and Jobs does not fail - Agric Minister
Thursday, June 23, 2022
The minister in charge of the sector where growing home grown cultivations should be adopted to increase the food crops in the food and stock supplies chain in the country for Ghanaian youth to enjoy abundance food after their hard day's labour has come out to speak for itself after learning of the anger kindled against its office when Ghanaian masses began to interrogate the impact his ministry is making in the lives of the poor Ghanaian farmers whose farming products are in some cases left on the farmlands to rot and deteriorate which incurs countless losses for the Ghanaian farmers.
The sector minister, Dr. Anthony Owusu Akoto Afriyie, earlier granted an interview to the Ghana Broadcasting Corporation where he admitted that he does not agree with those who are saying the initiative of his ministry under the programme called planting for foods and jobs, has woefully failed because it achieved nothing significant since the programme kick-started for a while now.
He discarded such assertions by a cross section of the general public saying there were numerous supports he personally lent of farmers whose yields were almost at the cross road and his ministry's willingness to achieving the targets set out by the ministry he heads.
He further stated that if the initiative of planting for foods and jobs were to have achieved completely nothing or failed miserably as claimed by certain elements of society how come there is an abundance of excess food in the country.
He against said it rhetorically that, why is it that there is excess food in Ghana but some people in Ghana are running down his ministry that it achieved totally nothing profitable since he assumed office as the minister for food and agricultural.
It is under the tenure of someone who is blowing up his own trumpet after stating that his ministry's willingness to offering farmers in the country with the needed supports they are able to produce crops in excess that food has become the commonest commodity one can see or chance upon seeing on the floor of every part of Ghana. It is possible some other individuals would continue to ridicule the minister when he proceeds with the bad tangent he is trying to chart because it appears to some people as if the minister is living in his own world.
The cost of buying food in Ghana at the moment is not of the appreciable price simply because it has completely gone out of hand for food prices in the market to remain stable in the Ghanaian markets as some are quick to attribute it to high cost of fertiliser products presently being plunged the farming industry with which some vulnerable farmers could not afford to pay for the cost involved due to the alleged shortchanging of other ignorant farmers who could raise an alarm on fertiliser products they were meant to be subsidised for to aid them in producing more and affordable home grown cultivations so that the sector's target of creating massive jobs for the teeming youth in the country would be realised but here we are, it is far from reality.
High cost of the inflation in Ghana is not allowing Ghanaian farmers to enjoy the fruits of their labour due to the luxurious manner in which such crops are sold out in various markets after they are bought from them on the farm on cheap rates where other crop products even spoil on the farm as a result of unavailable and ready markets to help such farmers have access to centres where they can trade their produce.
It is believed that some crooked officials at the ministry are at the blind side of the minister where the fertiliser products meant to be given out to Ghanaian farmers on low prices, some middlemen in those institutions took advantages of farmers and diabolically inflated the figures of the fertilisers just to extortion money from the ordinary farmers on their slow dying farms.