The Sissala East Municipal Assembly grew and distributed over 60,000 cashew seedlings to local farmers in the Municipality last year and aims to provide more improved varieties this year.

"We are following up to do the monitoring to ensure that the 60,500 seedlings stay on their (farmers) farmlands and begin to bear fruits for farmers to benefit," Mr Karim Nanyua, Sissala East Municipal Chief Executive, said.

"After we distributed them last year the concerns were that some were not able to bear fruits, so we are currently taking them from Wenchi and Babile," he added.

The two chief executives were speaking with the Ghana News Agency in separate interviews on the state of the Planting for Export and Rural Development programme intervention introduced to complement the Planting for Food Jobs programme.

The programme aims to scale up tree crop production such as cashew, cocoa, mangoes among others in the country.

Mr Nanyua said the Babile Agricultural Station has promised to supply the municipality with 20,000 grafted cashew seedlings but added the municipality was working to establish a plant breeding station to produce improved seedlings.

Mr Mohammed Zackaria Bakor, the Sissala West District Chief Executive (DCE), said about 30,000 cashew seedlings were distributed to 220 farmers last year with 586 more to benefit this year.

He said the Assembly is collaborating with the Tree Growers Association in the District to produce a lot more cashew seedlings in this year's crop season.

"This year the target was 100,000, but we were trying to get what we call polyclonal seedlings from Wenchi, unfortunately we were not fast enough, so by the time we paid the money they said the polyclonal seeds were short in supply so we have to rely on what we did last year," he said.

He said the Assembly has nursed about 32,000 which would soon be distributed to farmers.