The Deputy Country Director of TechnoServe, Mr Samuel Baba Adongo, has called for collective efforts to revamp the country’s rice sector.
According to him, the rice sector remains an untapped national resource that bears enormous potential of solving the country’s food needs, alleviating rural poverty and creating wealth.
Speaking in an interview on the sidelines of a rice festival in Accra, Mr. Adongo indicated that the sector was operating below its maximum potential.
“The smallholder rice farmers are not the beacons of success they are supposed to be and are failing to attract a future generation of rice farmers,” he said.
CARI initiative
To address this challenge, the Competitive African Rice Initiative (CARI), funded by the German Foreign Ministry, BMZ, and the Gates Foundation and implemented in Ghana by TechnoServe, was started in 2014 with the sole aim of supporting smallholder rice farmers.
“A year into the project, we are on course to turn around the livelihoods of over 100,000 rice farmers in four African countries, including Ghana, and improving the business of numerous rice processing firms and various players along the rice value chain,” Mr Adongo said.
Explaining further, he said the CARI was pillared on four main objectives, which include improving productivity and the quality of paddy rice based on sustainable and competitive rice productions systems and increasing efficiency of local rice value chain.
The CARI also seeks to improve access to financial services for all value chain actors, as well as to create an enabling environment at the national and regional levels, including policy framework and strengthening of rice sector initiative.
Ghana expose to food insecurity
Nearly 70 per cent of Ghana’s rice needs is imported. It is, therefore, important to note that only seven per cent of Ghana’s rice is traded across international borders.
That, he said, exposed the country to major food insecurity in the event that the production in the exporting country failed.
According to various sources, local rice production only satisfies between 30 to 40 per cent of national demand.
Consequently, an estimated US$500 million is spent on importation of rice annually, bleeding dry the country’s economy.
It is also an undeniable fact that Ghana has the potential of meeting the country’s demand for rice and competing competitively in the international markets in terms of quality and taste.
However, the deputy country director said it required a reorientation of the local rice farmer, support in the various stages of the value chain and advocacy initiatives to produce quality rice.
CARI in focus
According to him, these ideals motivate CARI’s actions to make crucial interventions in terms of training farmers in sustainable farming practices which include business education, access to finance, as well as inputs.
“Gradually, the capacity of our farmers is being built to think of rice farming not only as livelihoods but viable business opportunities,” he added.
He said CARI Ghana had within the last one year approved grants of over £1 million to seven partners to be used to provide a wide range of interventions for smallholder rice farmers, adding that three grants totaling £500, 000 would be approved before the end of the year.
“We are also fostering partnerships between our partners and financial institutions to raise additional financing to further consolidate their operations,” he stated.
He said it was his hope that by the end of this phase, CARI would have raised GH¢10 million for its partners in additional financing outside of the CARI Matching Grant Fund.
“All of this is aimed at increasing the incomes of the smallholder farmer from US$2 to US$ 4 per a day, effectively taking them over the poverty line,” he noted.
“With our vision of increasing paddy production by 4.5 metric tons per hectare, CARI will generate GH¢150 million into the economy by the end of the project’s first phase in 2017,” he added
Source: Graphic