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AGRICULTURE

GA E: Richard Ageh, best farmer wants subsidies to improve poultry production

The 2023 Ga East Municipal Best farmer, Richard Kofi Ageh said it is about time government intervened in the poultry industry to revamp the sector.

Date Created : 12/2/2023 12:00:00 AM : Story Author : Dominic Shirimori/Ghanadistricts.com

He said the poultry industry has become a capital intensive business without even any form of insurance making it unattractive to a lot of people because of the high risk involved.

Speaking at the 39th National Farmers' Day and 19th Municipal Farmers' Day celebration held at the Ahmadiya International School, Agbogba, on the theme: Delivering Smart Solutions For Sustainable Food Security and Resilience he said this year alone a lot of poultry farmers have closed down their business due to high cost of production.

To this end, he believes the way forward is for government to provide some incentives in a form of subsidies on their feed, drugs and fertilizers and would go a long way to help revive the industry.

He underscored the worsening situation in the sector saying "I remember when i started five years ago, a bag of maize was selling like GHC60.00, but now it has gone up to about GHC255.00 per bag. So the cost of feed is really killing us, and this is not helping us to produce to feed the nation.

If we have subsidies on our feed, we can even produce to feed the whole nation and we don’t need to import agricultural produce to the country, we can produce it at a competitive rate like we import it" he said.

Meanwhile, Madam Akua Kyeremanteng, the best Agro Processor, who for the passion for agro-business decided to abandon her job at Ecobank to take up farming and agro-processing reminded the public that agro-business is not a get-rich-quick scheme, but rather one that requires time and nurturing which eventually pays off hence people should take up that bold step and venture into agro-business.

The Municipal Chief Executive for Ga East, Elizabeth Kaakie Mann announced that government is working tirelessly to achieve its food security target in line with Goal 2 of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal - Zero Hunger which enjoins all nations to end hunger, achieve food security and improve nutrition and promote sustainable agriculture by the year 2030.

As such government would fully roll out the second phase if its agriculture flagship program, Planting for Food and Jobs beginning next year to deliver target solutions to the problems in the agric sector in line with the chosen theme for this year’s farmers' day celebration.

The five years master plan at full implementation is expected to change the face of Ghana's agriculture as it seeks to renew Ghana's agriculture with a new trajectory that would replace the old input-subsidy program with a new input-credit scheme.

She said the intervention is designed to accelerate and develop agriculture through a value chain approach, and all the beneficiary farmers need is land.

For their award, the best farmer took home a deep freezer, personal protective equipment, cutlass, harvesting crates, wellington boots, fertilizer, grain bag and sacks, and knap sack sprayer.

The rest took home similar items but with fridges and industrial blender.