President Akufo-Addo has started a new wave of campaign to get the youth to go into farming.
He believes that is the surest way of sustaining the country’s agriculture sector.
This was during the Presidential Conference on the ‘Youth in Agriculture’ initiative held at the Legon campus of the University of Ghana yesterday.
The youth, he said, are the future Ghana, stressing “we count on their vibrancy, fresh ideas, and innovation to improve our collective fortune.”
He, therefore, urged the country’s youth, both educated and uneducated, to rally around the new government initiative, ‘Youth in Agriculture’ programme and to take up agriculture as a lifetime vocation.
“It is obvious that expanded opportunities for the youth are inherent in the design of the programme (Youth in Agriculture) which focuses on value-chain development,” he stated, whilst noting with emphasis, “to take advantage of this opportunity, I urge the youth to rally around this initiative and form cooperatives and partnerships for the maximum benefit of the programme.”
Touching on the state of the economy and efforts his administration is making in order to bring economic stability and growth, President Akufo-Addo said there are clear signs that the economy is on a recovery path, and the evidence of it is in a downward trend of inflation.
“The prospects for the rebound are growing stronger and stronger. We are working hard to sustain this momentum,” he emphasised.
That, he said, was evident that “inflation has reduced from 54.1% in December 2022 to 38.1% in September, and there is every indication that by the end of the year it will be around 27%. By the end of my tenure next year, 15%.”
On his part, the Minister for Food and Agriculture, Bryan Acheampong indicated that the new “Youth in Agriculture” initiative which is a component of the second phase of the Planting for Food and Jobs (PFJ) programme, is designed to support the youthful population to go into agriculture as stress-free as possible.
That, he said, will mean putting 400,000 hectares of arable land under cultivation.
The target commodities under this intervention would include maize, rice, and vegetables.
The minister envisaged “if we put all the 400,000 hectares of land under rice cultivation alone, we will exceed our food self-sufficiency production target of 1.8 million metric tonnes in two years instead of the five-year plan under the Planting for Food and Jobs Programme.”
By Charles Takyi-Boadu, Presidential Correspondent