Mr Yussiff Zimbe Badia, the Assembly Member for the Sigri Electoral Area in the Wa West District, has appealed to the government and Non-governmental Organisations to help provide farmers with a tractor for ploughing purposes.

He said through the Planting for Food and Jobs (PFJ) programme, there was an abundance of farm inputs such as fertilizer for the farmers, but that farmers could not derive the maximum benefit of the programme due to the lack of timely access to ploughing services.

Mr Badia made the appeal in an interview with the Ghana News Agency (GNA) at Dorimon on the sidelines of a fertilizer distribution fair organised by the Co-operative Development Foundation Canada (CDF-Canada) for beneficiaries of its Access Project.

“If the government could help us with a tractor, it would have been good”.

The Assembly Member also appealed to the government to provide the Electoral Area with a dam under the One-Village-One-Dam project to enable their livestock to have access to drinking water.

On her part, Madam Tagaasori Dampuori, a farmer at Maase explained that women in the community could not engage in meaningful farming due to their difficulty in accessing tractor services.
“You look for the tractor and will not get, the time you will farm it is already late and you will get a poor harvest, so we really need a tractor to plough on time to enjoy good harvest”, she explained.

Mr Joseph Dary, a farmer at Nyose, also told the GNA that though the Wa West District Assembly had a mechanisation centre for farmers in the district, the tractors were not enough.

"The time the tractor will move from one community to your community, the ploughing period will have passed, Mr Dary noted.