Budgetary Allocation For Agric To Go Up

The government is to increase the budgetary allocation for agriculture from the current six per cent to 10 percent to help alleviate poverty and enable the country to be a net exporter of food in the near future.

Vice President John Mahama, who announced this in Accra yesterday, said the government will also assist peasant farmers to go into medium and large scale farming, especially in areas with large tracts of land to improve their income.

The announcement comes at a time that the country spends in excess of one billion dollars annually to import food items which it has comparative advantage to produce.

It also follows the government’s declared intention to review taxes and duties on imported food items to create a fair competing ground for local farmers. Mr Mahama was speaking with a five- member delegation from the NEPAD Secretariat in South Africa who paid a courtesy call on him at the Castle, Osu.

The NEPAD Secretariat is to be transformed into a new agency to be known as NEPAD Planning policies of the African Union.

The delegation, led by Dr Ibrahim Assam Mayaki, Chief Executive of the NEPAD Secretariat, is on a three day visit to solicit Ghana’s support for capacity development initiatives in line with the NEPAD agenda.

Vice President Mahama said since majority of African countries are engaged in agriculture, there is the need to increase investments in that sector to help reduce poverty and to enable the continent to contain the world food crisis.

He said Ghana is evolving schemes that will attract the youth into agriculture to make Ghana a net exporter of goods in the near future.

He stated that when NEPAD was conceptualisd, there was the debate as to whether it was relevant and added that unlike past initiatives; NEPAD has made impact, especially in the energy, transport and technology fields.

Vice president Mahama stressed the need for African countries to deal with the projects and concepts of NEPAD on a multi-national basis to leverage their financial strengths rather than on parochial country interest.

Dr Mayaki said apart from reviewing the capacity development projects of the Secretariat, the delegation will also analyse with stakeholders such as government representatives, external partners and the universities on how the capacity development strategy framework can be applied in the agricultural sector.

That, he said, will enable the Secretariat to come out with a review framework for the new NEPAD agency.

Dr Mayaki commended the country for making strides in the implementation of processes relating to the African Peer Review mechanism, the catalyst for NEPAD, which he said , has yielded dividends in governance and capacity development.

Source: Ghanaian Times