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An agricultural report on Joy News's public engagement program called Scorecard looked at the 23-month Akufo-Addo government.
A farmer who predicts maize abundance over the next year is unhappy with his own predictions. Abundance will be wasted, Christian Marfo gave another just more disturbing prediction.
Post-harvest cultivation in Ghana is still not up to par. Thus, Ghanaians should accept the good news of abundance and then prepare for a period of waste created by humans.
According to a 2016 study, Ghana loses more than 318,500 tonnes of maize a year. Or, you can imagine more than 63.7 million spent bags of corn. If these bags were distributed free of charge to each of Ghana's 27 million citizens, each one would bring back two bags.
Maize is the second largest staple crop in the country after cocoa. It accounts for more than 50% of the country's total cereal production.
It's a lifesaver for many people living below the poverty line and for those engaged in poultry production, but corn is another lifeline, providing feed for livestock.
"If I do not eat corn for 150,000 birds, they will die," said a poultry farmer in May 2018, when the shortage of staple foods was reported.
And so, when the government launched the Plant to Feed and Create Jobs program in April 2017, the potential impact of this policy was obvious: food and jobs.
Christian Marfo was full of praise for the program. Almost full of praise.
With his farms around the regions of Ejura, Atebubu and Sekyre Odumase, he said he saw the program actually eliminate an armed robbery.
"The program has had a positive impact on being honest with you," he said in Joy Scorecard, where the almost two-year-old Akufo-Addo government was being evaluated.
According to Marfo, a farmer who has planted 1,000 acres of corn and 500 acres of sorghum has to employ 300 people to manage his farms.
Crime has come down and with it, the drop in food prices, he said.
"A whole bag of carrots costs 50 cedis," said the farmer. "A whole bag of eggplants goes for 10cedis," a public revelation at the Labadi Beach hotel in Accra.
But he lamented that for farmers, the abundance is rewarded by the fact that the prices will be determined by the buyers and that the farmers will have to yield to the low prices proposed otherwise their products will perish.
Marfo had a hard time pointing out that the government urgently needed to build storage and treatment facilities.
Dr. Sagre Bambangiwas, Deputy Minister of Food and Agriculture, was present to give badurances. "We are working, we are meeting our challenges after the harvest," he said.
He revealed 30 warehouses with a capacity of 1,000 metric tons each. Some 50 other warehouses are also in the process of being awarded contracts, he said.
Photo: Mr. Sagre Bambangi is a member of the Walewale constituency in the north of the country and a former lecturer at the University of Development Studies.
The construction of silos while an obvious solution was once controversial under Kwame Nkrumah. His government has built silos with a potential storage capacity of 200,000 tonnes atTema.
It's much more spacious than the 80 combined silos that the government is still trying to build. The silos at Nkrumah were built at a cost of £ 8.5 million.
One of the silos was a colossal concrete structure up to 10 stories high in the sky. Its large bowels contain 14 compartments with a grain storage capacity of 1,000 metric tons each.
The 10-storey, giant grain silo complexes are the tallest buildings in the immediate port area built by the Nkrumah government as part of the Tema Food Complex Corporation (TFCC) project.
It aimed at storing cocoa for the world's leading cash crop and storing grain for national food sufficiency and security.
Photo: Silos at the port of Tema: Credit: nonjeneregretterien.blogspot.com
The political opposition, the World Bank and foreign interests have strongly criticized the construction. A foreign report on Mr. Nkrumah's industrialization plan says:
"Nkrumah has spent a lot of money to build roads, homes, schools, hospitals, factories, steel mills, mining and the largest dry dock in Africa rarely used. He built the Akosombo Dam and a hydroelectric plant on the Volta at the expense of spreading endemic river blindness. "
The silo project was finally abandoned. The storage facility is heavily infested with rodents.
Some 51 years after the construction of the silos, they are still standing, while the post-harvest storage capacity of the government is insufficient.
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