Benso (W/R), Sept. 24, GNA - The government is looking into the possibility of turning about 230,000 hectares out of 640,000 hectares of degraded mining lands into the cultivation of oil palm under the President's Special Initiative (PSI) on oil palm.

Mr Kwamina Bartels, Minister of Private Sector Development, said this at the end of his two-day tour of the Twifo Oil Palm Plantation (TOPP) in the Central Region and the Benso Oil Palm Plantation (BOPP) in the Western Region.

He said his ministry was negotiating with the Ministry of Lands and Forestry and the Minerals Commission to release the degraded mining lands to communities in those areas who are interested to go into oil palm cultivation.

Mr Bartels said 300,000 hectares of land are to be cultivated with oil palm and that the Western, Central, Brong Ahafo, Ashanti, Eastern and Volta regions had been selected for the PSI on Oil Palm.

He said so far the government had sunk 22 billion cedis into raising 12 high yielding oil palm nurseries for the supply of two million seedlings to farmers who have prepared lands for cultivation. The minister appealed to traditional councils to embrace the initiative by going into oil palm cultivation themselves or to release lands to their people who want to go into the cultivation of the crop. He said the PSI projects were meant to create employment for the youth, especially those in the rural areas.

Mr Bartels commended BOPP for the progress it had made in all fields of its operations and urged the management to sustain the achievement.

He expressed concern about the deplorable state of the Apowa-BOPP road and called on the Ministry of Road and Transport to rehabilitate to facilitate the transportation of their farm produce to the marketing centres.

Mr Bartels said since the HIPC fund can now be used for road repairs the Apowa-BOPP road should be taken care of as a matter of urgency to attract many more investors into the PSI on Oil Palm.