Disclosing this to Parliament on Thursday, July 29, during the presentation of the 2021 mid-year budget review, Ken Ofori-Atta outlined a number of interventions aimed at improving the agriculture value chain.
He said, “specific interventions include support for the establishment of a cassava processing plant, provision of technical assistance to the garment and textile as well as the pharmaceutical industries.”
He assured stakeholders in the agriculture value chain of government’s support to improve their yields and farm output as the Ghana CARES programme will provide catalytic support to drive efficiency and improve outputs in the agricultural sector by investing in data and digital technology.
“Mr. Speaker, to modernise our agriculture sector, we are investing in initiatives that will improve production and productivity in the rice, poultry, soybean, and tomato sub-sectors this year," Ofori-Atta said further.
“The recent engagement with all the value-chain actors in these sub-sectors has sharpened the focus of investments in a holistic manner. We are therefore providing interest rate subsidies, facilitating equipment acquisition, linking markets and producers as well as promoting relevant research in these sub-sectors. The youth are being supported this year to become out-growers for anchor farmers and boost their participation in commercial farming.
“Additionally, the program would support the reform of the fertilizer subsidy system using digital technology, to make it more efficient and less prone to smuggling. This would be achieved by registering farmers for improved targeting. The registration will provide information on farmers’ biodata, crops cultivated, acreage, digital location of farms to track seed and fertilizer subsidy programmes. By the end of February 2022, 1.2 million farmers will be registered,” he disclosed.
