Ghana is recording “a lot of progress” in agricultural development despite the obvious challenges, the Country Representative of the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), Dr. Lamourdia Thiombiano, has said in an exclusive wide-ranging interview with the Business & Financial Times.

While this progress may not meet “ideal expectations”, it nonetheless ought to be recognised as the general trend of agricultural development is positive, he said.

“There’s an African proverb which says everyone hears the fall of a tree, but when the forest is growing no one hears it. The agricultural sector is exactly the same. When there is an emergency like a drought or a flood, everyone hears it, but when it performs well we take it for granted. So there’s a lot of progress that has been made,” Dr. Thiombiano said.

He explained that on many indicators – such as productivity and fertilizer application – the trend has been upward, even though certain hindrances to realising the full tremendous potential of agriculture have yet to be addressed.

Fertilizer application has doubled from five kilogrammes per hectare to 10, while the yield of crops like cassava and yam has improved substantially, sometimes by about 25-50 percent in growth.

“Ultimately, this brings more income at community level. But it also brings more income in terms of the trade balance – because if a country doesn’t produce enough it has to import, but when it produces, the level of imports will be reduced. All this progress can be seen but maybe not at the rate some people would have expected.”

After seeing a slowdown during 2011-12, agriculture’s expansion picked up to 5.2 percent in 2013, and the sector accounted for 22 percent of GDP that year. Many recognise that this performance needs to be improved since agriculture provides the most jobs among the three main economic sectors.

Dr. Thiombiano, who doubles as the FAO’s Deputy Regional Representative in Africa, said the relative low growth of agriculture compared to other sectors is a sign that investment needs to be improved.

Within West Africa, Ghana ranks highly on the level of private capital flowing into agriculture. Yet more investment is required from both government and the private sector.

“That’s where the conducive policy is important,” the FAO chief said, “because if you are a private sector company, you want to invest in an area where the rules and regulations are very good and conducive for your business.”

This is also where the FAO’s assistance is critical. There are three principal kinds of assistance the organisation provides to Ghana – and other members. The first one is at the policy level, which is assisting the government in designing and implementing policies that facilitate agricultural development.

The second area is related to technical support for farmers in the field in terms of transferring know-how and best practices. Being a global organisation of experts and researchers, the FAO has knowledge of practices that have worked elsewhere and could be adapted in Ghana.

The third level involves training and capacity-building for the different stakeholders in agriculture. The organisation runs a number of programmes and curricula addressing the needs of varied agricultural actors.

The issues tackled in these programmes are many and include post-harvest handling and forestry resources management.

“Currently, we are supporting the government to revise the rules and regulations in the livestock sector – because these rules and regulations are outdated and the government is trying to reformulate policy in the sector with new rules that address the current context and challenges,” Dr. Thiombiano said.

“We are also supporting the fisheries sector, basically the export of tuna to Europe and other countries. In terms of technical support, we have the papaya sector which was attacked by a disease that brought down the whole sector to a point where Ghana was no longer able to export abroad.

With FAO support, we were able to implement a project which has totally reversed the trend. Now Ghana has started exporting again, and we have seen concretely how this sector is currently vibrant.”

Asked whether there are any non-traditional crops which hold the promise of becoming significant cash earners for the country in future, Dr. Thiombiano mentioned cassava and yam.

Ghana is the fourth-biggest cassava producer in Africa and cassava yields have been improving through technical assistance from the FAO. Cassava, apart from being directly consumed, is used in alcohol production, as feed for livestock, and for bio-energy.

Yam is also a niche which has not been exploited enough. Not many countries produce the crop, and the government is currently formulating a strategy for yam production to address challenges such as post-harvest losses, reckoned to be between 20-40 percent.

If this strategy is implemented, yam could soon become an important export commodity, Dr. Thiombiano said.

The biggest problem facing agriculture in the country is post-harvest management, he added. “The statistics show that we have 30-40 percent post-harvest losses. If we are able to reduce it to a level of 5 percent, we’ll have 25-35 percent more produce. So this is really a key challenge. Together with it is the whole value-chain approach, because agricultural development should be a complete package – post-harvest management, processing, packaging, and access to market.

"We need to develop the whole value-chain – going from production, transformation, packaging and marketing. You can have an area where there’s excellent production, but how to move it to another area where there is a market can be challenging and this should be addressed. How to increasingly trade this agricultural production with other countries in the sub-region is also an issue to be considered.”

Climate change is also a real threat to the sector that should be mitigated or managed through adaptive mechanisms, Dr. Thiombiano said. Skepticism towards climate change has moderated as evidence continues to show average global temperatures rising.

On the ground, the evidence is seen in increased frequency and intensity of exceptional events such as droughts and pest attacks.

“The continent will face major challenges in terms of the impact of climate change on agricultural production,” the FAO chief said, adding that countries like Ghana that practice rainfall-dependent agriculture are at risk of shifting rainfall patterns.

“At community level, this phenomenon will bring more vulnerability to farming. That is why as an organisation we are thinking of ways together with the government and the private sector to effectively support an insurance system to manage those risks.

We shouldn’t leave it to the farmers or the communities only to manage the risks. We should also see how to assist them. In many countries such as South Africa and Kenya, there are insurance schemes that have been put in place to reduce the vulnerability of farmers to climate change.”

Dr. Thiombiano said the FAO has declared 2014 as the International Year of Family Farming to recognise the millions of smallholders, including those in Africa who produce 70 percent of the continent’s food.

The methods used by small-scale farmers, under certain circumstances, are more environmentally-friendly than those employed by large-scale commercial farmers. One of the reasons for the celebration is therefore to acknowledge the efforts of these farmers to conserve the environment even as they feed the ever-increasing population of the world.

Supporting small-scale agriculture will help to reduce poverty in Africa, given that most poor people engage in farming, Dr. Thiombiano said. Such support will also enhance the attractiveness of farming and provide jobs for most of the 11 million young people pouring into Africa’s labour market annually.

“When you look at the economic landscape, I don’t see any country which can absorb such large people looking for jobs without boosting agricultural growth and development. And to do that you need to create a conducive environment,” Dr. Thiombiano said.