2 Shots of Thoughts for Farmer’s Day

The first Friday in December is set aside in Ghana as a public holiday in recognition of the roles farmers play in the development of the nation.

Today, 7th December, is no different.

To commemorate this day, I have put this piece together regarding my experiences and some facts of Agriculture in Ghana and globally. You may also call them ‘myth busters’ if you so wish!

First, farming has gone beyond land size. Today, I put a goodwill note on my WhatsApp status wishing all a Happy Farmer’s Day. In response to this, a friend of mine studying Finance and in his final year in a university in Accra asked me how many acres of land I owned as a farmer (since I majored in Agriculture at the university).

Not so surprised, I told him zero (0) because though my parents have farmlands, they are not mine. His assumptions are no different from a lot of friends of mine and Ghanaians who think one must have large acres of land to be able to do anything meaningful in Agriculture. Ghana as a country is a whopping 15 times the land area of the Netherlands, yet the latter is the second largest exporter of agricultural produce globally with annual incomes exceeding 90 billion Euros in 2017 ( https://bit.ly/2mUarax ).

This fact is lost on a lot of us as Ghanaians, especially those who are not players in the field of Agriculture (Personally, I got to know this during an orientation for participants in the New Business Challenge organised by the Ghana Netherlands Business and Cultural Council (GNBCC) and its partners).

Due to our association of farm size to harvest, farmers consistently keep clearing new lands to increase their harvest instead of ensuring their farms produce to the optimum.

In the cocoa sector, Ghanaian farmers produce an average yield of 350kg-400kg per hectare whilst Indonesia (third largest producer of cocoa after Ivory Coast and us) achieves an average of 800kg per hectare as compared with a theoretical maximum of 1.5 tonnes per hectare.

This means that even though we produce a lot of cocoa than Indonesia, any issue that leads to a reduction in land area cropped with cocoa will have a significant impact on total yield here than it would in Indonesia. A perfect example is the galamsey scare that was ravaging several tracts of farmland.

Secondly, more production does not always equal more income for a nation. This is particularly true in our case as a nation that produces a lot of materials in their raw form for export. For most cash crops produced, we export them in their raw state with no or very little processing, this means we get very little value for our bumper harvests.

The chocolate industry is the best depiction of this. With a value of $131.7 billion by 2019, the chocolate industry dwarfs its major component which stoops at a humbling $2.1 billion (MarketsandMarkets).

Unfortunately for us, we are major shareholders not in the booming chocolate industry but rather in the not so profitable cocoa trade. Several policies from governments and COCOBOD has been geared towards producing more and more cocoa with little to no attention being paid to processing. Although we may get the desired results of a bumper harvest, the price we get on the world market is a drop in the ocean as compared to what the processors will make.

YES Magazine in an article noted that, ‘Ghanaian cocoa farmers are getting about 77 cents per pound, where a high-end maker selling 2-ounce chocolate bars for $9 apiece earns $72 per pound. Even your basic $2 bar brings in $16 per pound, about 20 times what the farmer gets. According to the Fairtrade Foundation, cocoa growers in West Africa earn, on average, about 6 percent of the final cost of a chocolate bar’(https://bit.ly/2QHsGAd ) We definitely cannot continue on this tangent.

It is however satisfying that Ghana and Cote d’Ivoire has finally managed to come to a consensus as to how to trade cocoa on the global market. According to a September 4, 2018 report by GraphicOnline, the Chief Executive Officer of COCOBOD, Mr Joseph Aidoo, is reported to have said at the meeting between representatives from Ghana and Cote d’Ivoire that “One of the things we will do is to try and make our trading systems work along the same lines. We want it to be such that we can say we are both selling at this time, at this price and anything below that we will not sell,”.

This strategy has obviously been done by these countries to ensure they get the most out of their produce. Nevertheless, one wonders what will happen to the cocoa beans should the price on the world market fall below the floor price set by the joint commission of these two countries?

Will the cocoa be stored? Very unlikely as we do not have the ability to do this partly because initiatives such as the silos built by Dr. Kwame Nkrumah have been abandoned and probably left as monuments of a great past.

Will COCOBOD fix them? That’s an alternative they can definitely explore. Otherwise, the other ‘dreaded’ but seemingly better alternative of processing the cocoa beans locally will have to be given a lot more attention.

Conclusion

Farmers definitely deserve more than a holiday. By all means we have to help the Agriculture industry to grow and become sustainable, otherwise the mass exodus of the populace from the sector and the hocus pocus prevailing will soon leave us all with famine dangling in our faces.

The writer is a winner of the Kuapa Kokoo

Inter-Tertiary Debate Championship(2018)

and a National Service Person(Teaching and Research Assistant)

at Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology

e-mail:abedopey@gmail.com