MECHANISED FARMING REQUIRES SUPPORT

THE President, John Agyekum Kufuor, last week cut the sod for work to begin on a tractor assembly plant in Tema.
The plant, expected to assemble 10 tractors a day and about 2500 a year, will help modernise agriculture in the country by way of improved mechanisation.
The DAILY GRAPHIC wishes to commend Foundries and Agric Machinery (GH) Limited and Escort Limited of India, the two institutions collaborating in this venture.
The fact that agriculture is the mainstay of the Ghanaian economy, providing employment for more than 50 per cent of Ghanaians, is well known, yet, agricultural production in the country has largely been on a subsistence basis because of the traditional method used in farming that is the machete and the hoe.
Over the years, Ghanaians have agonisingly been compelled to import foods such as rice and yellow corn with foreign currency, because we fail to apply the right mechanised and scientific approach by which we can produce and even export these food crops.
It is important to note that almost all the governments the country has had, both military and civilian, have made attempts to increase agricultural production. However, these efforts have been hampered one way or another.
Notable among these efforts was the rather revolutionary programme of the General Acheampong-led NRC government, popularly dubbed ‘Operation Feed Yourself (OFY)’, that placed a premium on self-sufficiency in food production.
Clearly, the past should serve to inform our next move and remind us that it takes something more than sheer desire to attain self-sufficiency in food production, especially in a global economic environment where market forces can be very erratic and unpredictable.
Thus, the success of any agricultural production effort rests on the ability to, as much as possible, maximise yields and reduce man-hours. That is where mechanisation and a scientific approach to food cultivation play a critical role.
It is worrying that our farming methods are so traditional that in an era where tissue culture is used to produce planting materials for cultivation, a lot of our farmers are still stuck to the old order of cultivation.
Even more worrying is the acute dependence on nature’s mercy by way of rainfall to nourish our plants.
That should not be the case, especially considering the potential for irrigation farming in the country. Some countries do not boast the amount of water resources we have, yet they have been able to embark on irrigation farming with greater success, with the building of dams in dry areas.
The DAILY GRAPHIC wishes to acknowledge efforts made in some parts of the country, particularly the northern parts of the country, where irrigation dams have been built.
We reckon that some of these dams have silted and efforts must be made to rehabilitate them.
We urge the Ministry of Food and Agriculture and non-governmental organisations in the country to devote more resources to popularise irrigation farming in the country.
As a country, the unfavourable world economic order should spur us on to energise our agriculture in order to end our over-dependence on imported food items by pursuing policies that will give meaning to the dictum “grow what you eat and eat what you grow”.