The Upper East Regional Directorate of the Ministry of Agriculture has started engagements with actors in the tomato value chain to revamp tomato production, to sustain local market consumption in the country.

The initiative comes with the full complement of research scientists from UDS and SARI, Tomato Traders and Transporters Association of Ghana (TTTAG), input dealers MoFA, and the Irrigation Company of Upper East Region (ICOUR) among others.

Francis Ennor, the Regional MoFA Director in an address to participants said the initiative would provide support to 98 farmers to be selected across seven districts in the region.

They would be given skills to produce to meet standardized protocols in production and later be scaled up to all farmers committed to the production of tomatoes in the region and the trend of traders bypassing the region to buy tomatoes from Burkina Faso would be reversed.

Mr Ennor assured all in the tomato business that the annual glut of the produce, refusal of traders to buy due to quality issues and robbery cases when tomato traders travelled to Burkina Faso to buy the produce would be over by the next production period.

He stated that the Upper East Region had all the resources to produce and market its tomatoes, however an attitudinal change of the farmers was critical to the new direction planned for the industry and also indicated that “taking Agriculture to a higher level is key and the only way our people will get employment”.

The Director called on the farmers to be committed to the new drive if they wanted to create and improve market opportunities and income levels.

Some of the tomato farmers who shared their experiences enumerated their challenges as seed varieties, disease, withering of the plants, fertilizer, weather conditions during transplanting period, wrong use of insecticides and poor soils.

Joseph Agambila, a farmer noted that some seed varieties though good needed to be properly packaged and added that some input dealers retailed seeds without appropriate labeling and therefore farmers only get to know the varieties after the tomatoes had fruited.

Eric Osei Tuffour, Chairman, TTTAG, also at the meeting reiterated the association’s criteria of buying their produce.

He specifically stated that they received the best services from farmers in Burkina Faso and urged farmers in the region to prepare to provide quality and preferred variety and good packaging in the tomato business.