Minister of Food and Agriculture, Dr. Owusu Afriyie Akoto has indicated a successful kick-off of one of government’s flagship programs, the Planting for Food and Jobs initiative.

According to him, though the policy is still in its infancy stages, it has to a large extent impacted positively, the agricultural value chain in the country.

Speaking at the Agric and Agribusiness Investment Forum on Tuesday October 3, Dr. Afriyie Akoto said that government’s objective to register a total of 200,000 farmers out of the estimated 5 million for the start of the program has been successful as government has already covered more than 180,000 of them and is confident of a complete cover by close of year.

“We strongly believe in learning to crawl before learning to walk before learning to run, so we selected out of the 5 million farmers, 200,000, as at the end of July, we had registered 185,000, and this was before the minor season which has just began so we are on target of reaching the 200,000”.

“As a government, we are very confident that this program has been very successful, the farmers in spite of the short notice given them and didn’t know what we were about, now everybody knows about planting for food and jobs policy, now we know”

He admitted that the implementation of the program has not been without challenges, maintaining, however, the fact that lessons from the constraints are being factored in the development of new ideas for better results next year.

A lot of lessons are being learnt, we haven’t finished, the harvest for the main crop is ongoing and we are feverishly preparing that not one grain is left under the farm gate with the help of small holders. We have registered 291 individuals, companies, cooperatives, groups of traders for our product which we are expecting a bumper crop because of the impact that this great program has had on agriculture even in its infancy. We have commandeered warehouses from the Ghana Cocobod for the first time ever to be able to use as part of the marketing chain for grain marketing in Ghana and it is working very well for us”.

"The lessons we are learning from it is providing a lot for our planning for next year".

“275 warehouses which have been left unused by Ghana Cocobod is now available for our program with a total capacity of 95,000 metric tonnes which is a great input to what we are doing”.