Ho, May 17, GNA - Mr J.H. Mensah, Chairman of the National Development Planning Commission (NDPC), has said taking Ghana out of the third-world bracket into a middle-level income status was a choice that Ghanaians must make and not only wish for.

He said the national strategies must be those that everybody would ascribe to and be committed to attain.

Mr Mensah, who is also Member of Parliament of Sunyani-East, was addressing an NDPC Consensus-Building workshop on Ghana's Long Term Vision in Ho for political party leaders. He said the plan must be based on verifiable data, or "we strive in futility." Mr Mensah said the resolve to achieve set goals was as important as the resources but expressed regret that often Ghanaians dissipated their energies on unnecessary bickering over issues. Mr Mensah said Ghana must "drive itself harder" towards its goals, commending the "dramatic examples of Vietnam and Cambodia," where national commitment had spurred the two countries out of economic backwardness and all round structural dislocations. He said agriculture must be radically transformed from a dreary chore for unsophisticated land tillers into a business where acreages of crops could be increased and sold at economically reasonable prices to processing chains.

Mr Mensah expressed regret that lending by the Agricultural Development Bank to farmers had dropped drastically and the seedlings production process failing. He urged political parties and all Ghanaians to "buy into" national development strategies to insulate the process from change of governments.

Dr Regina O. Adu-Twum, Director-General of the NDPC, said evidence from all over the world indicated that no nation could accelerate its social and economic development without properly articulating its vision for development and mobilizing its resources towards achieving that vision.

She said Ghana had achieved some economic breakthroughs but the economy "remains basically fragile, small, open, highly dependent on external inflows and vulnerable to shocks triggered by global fluctuations in commodity prices as we are witnessing today". Dr Adu-Twum said the NDPC was therefore building a consensus to develop a long-term plan that incorporates strategies for attaining a middle-income status by 2015.

Dr Adu-Twum urged political leaders to come along with the NDPC to build a plan to be owned by the entire country. Dr Nii Moi Thompson, representing the Convention Peoples Party (CPP), called for the updating of data to make planning effective. He said the hyped per capita income target of 1,000 dollars by the 2015, must go along with other social indicators in any evaluations, slamming the continuing waste in the system as demonstrated by the confusion about the real number of people on government pay roll. Mr Boakye Kyeremanteng Agyarko, of the New Patriotic Party (NPP) said as a nation "we must agree to squeeze ourselves to achieve development".

He said the creative intellectual capacity to build the nation was crucial and that money must be moved from the unproductive areas to productive sectors.

Mr Yaw Osafo Marfo, also of the NPP said the revision of the Vision 2020 document was to make projections more realistic and feasible. Alhaji Ahmed Ramadan, National Chairman of the People's National Convention (PNC) said governments must accept it when their policies fail, while Ms Frances Essiam, of the Democratic Freedom Party (DFP) said policy issues should not be tainted with political propaganda.