The Founder and Chief Executive Officer of the Legacy Crop Improvement Centre (LCIC), Amos Rutherford Azinu, has called on the government to implement measures and policies aimed at empowering smallholder farmers to transition into commercial farming.
According to Azinu, this transition should be a top priority for the government if it hopes to achieve long-term food security and economic growth in the agricultural sector.
Speaking on the Citi Breakfast Show on Wednesday, March 19, Mr. Azinu highlighted the inefficiencies in the current agricultural framework, particularly the heavy reliance on imported seeds under the Food and Jobs programme by the erstwhile New Patriotic Party (NPP) administration.
He argued that a more sustainable approach would be to strengthen local seed production and ensure that smallholder farmers are given the necessary support to scale up their operations.
Mr. Azinu pointed out that Ghana’s agricultural policies in recent years have created what he termed a procurement economy around the seed industry, where a significant amount of money is spent on importing seeds that may not even be suitable for the country’s climatic conditions.
“We have built a procurement economy around the seed economy. In the past, we spent GH¢2.6 billion on the Food and Jobs programme trying to import seeds from elsewhere and bringing them to this jurisdiction which some of them will not even survive the high temperature that we have and so government must look at that.
“But basically, the most important thing for the government to do is to see how we can transition from the smallholder system to commercial farming. One of the things the government is not looking at over the years is to set the floor price for major commodities that we produce and consume.”