He advised the youth, many of whom had shown interest in the government’s Planting for Food and Jobs programme to be resilient because there were still many opportunities in agribusiness that they could explore.

Mr Asiedu said this in an interview with the GRAPHIC BUSINESS after meeting a section of the youth interested in exploring opportunities in agribusiness.

The government’s Planting for Food and Jobs has received encouraging response as more than 100,000 individuals, most of them being the youth, have already registered to take part in the programme.

However, the invasion of the fall army worms across the 10 regions in the country is threatening the success of the programme. As a result, some of the youth who had already registered under the programme are contemplating their next line of action.

Mr Asiedu, however, urged them not to give up, stating that “there are challenges in every business and this might have come at a time that you might have been going into it, but you can still survive it if you take the necessary precautions.”

Although the army worm invasion which had destroyed many farms was a scare to the youth who are not yet well grounded in agriculture, Mr Asiedu said it was not enough reason for them to abandon their agribusiness dreams.

“It’s like running a business, you can immediately run into a problem but you learn lessons and come out of it so its important once this has happened, we will put in place mitigating factors when we are going into any agribusiness venture,” he stated.

“This is a natural occurrence and it will re-occur from time to time so it’s important to foresee some of these challenges and make provisions for them. You have to do scenario planning,” he added.

Insurance cover

Mr Asiedu also advised them to consider taking insurance cover for their farms to cushion them in such circumstances.

“It is also important that when we set up businesses, we don’t put all our capital fully into it. We need to have some contingencies to address some of these occurrences,” he noted.

“We, therefore, have to set aside a portion of our investment capital possibly to go into other investments so we fall on that money in times like this,” he added.

Fall army worm

Fall Army Worms, which are pests that feed on more than 80 plant species, have invaded lots of farms in the country in the last couple of months.

The pests, which originated in America, had never been seen on the African continent until last year; and since then, Nigeria, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Kenya and Ghana have seen these pests invade farms.

The army worm was first reported on maize in the Yilo Krobo District of the Eastern Region in April 2016 with maize being its main host. Currently, it has spread to all 10 regions in the country.