Mr. Sylvester Adongo Northern Regional Director of the Ministry of Food and Agriculture (MOFA) has urged Agricultural Extension Officers (AEO) in the region to adopt innovative ways to make farming attractive and rewarding in order to boost agriculture production.
He observed that although farmers in the region were hard working and had increased the land area under cultivation and tried all types of technologies recommended by research and extension officers they were still loosing the battle to attain food security.
Mr. Adongo was addressing a two-day training workshop organised for middle level personnel of the MOFA in the Northern Region in Tamale on Monday. The workshop aims at keeping them abreast with the latest technologies and developments in the agriculture front.
Mr. Adongo said, while our farmers were breaking their backs to produce food to feed the people, Ghana was spending more than two billion cedis a year importing food such as chicken, rice, milk, wheat, sugar and meat.
He said conservative estimates show that the country imports 100 per cent of wheat, 90 per cent of sugar, 66 per cent of rice, 50 per cent of meat, 33 per cent of chicken and 15 per cent of milk.
"This shows that we are virtually eating "outside and not at home. How long can we depend on other people to feed us", Mr. Adongo asked.
Mr. Adongo appealed to the agriculture extension officers to discard the old ways of working if they wanted to make any impact on the work of farmers and urged them to be innovative in addressing the problems of land preparation, low yielding crops and livestock, land and water management, disease and pest control, harvesting and handling and the processing and packaging among others.
He said there was the need for them to help farmers to realise that they could overcome their poverty by building their confidence in their business and helping them to plan and invest wisely in what they were producing.
"Train them to manage their farming as a business, disabuse their thinking that farming is for the illiterate, old and rural people. Let them teach their educated children to start farming businesses and not go to the cities in search of government jobs," Mr. Adongo told the extension officers.
He told them to also draw programmes to assist a number of individuals and communities to attain food security over a period and work towards it, saying, "This will show that you too are taking your extension work as a business and not a way of life".
Dr. Paschal Atendam, a consultant said the workshop was not going to be too much engaged in technicalities but would rather reflect on the situation that was negating efforts of farmers to produce enough food, not only to feed the region alone, but the county as a whole.
He said the workshop would discuss issues such as decentralised and participatory planning and gender based training which involves equity in resource allocation and use and mainstreaming topics such as conflict management and HIV/AIDS in the work of agriculture extension officers.