The Ministry of Food and Agriculture (MoFA), has asked agriculture oriented businesses to invest into climate-smart agriculture (CSA) opportunities.
The Ministry noted that green businesses working towards environmental improvement and sustainability have been extremely profitable globally.
MoFA’s Director of Crop Services, Mr. Seth Osei-Akoto, addressing participants at a workshop on Creating Green Business through Climate-Smart Agriculture said, the changing phase of the country’s climate will, in the future, pose challenges to farming.
The threat, he noted, may in turn affect the sustenance of the socio-economic development of Ghana in regard to food production.
“There is the need for our businesses and famers to consider investing heavily in soil management and conditioning [organic fertilizer production and sale], agronomic practices [production and sale of organic insecticides], efficient water management [production and sale of solar irrigation systems], and technologies in agriculture harvest and post-harvesting,” he said.
Other prospects, he explained, include livestock feed preparation, agriculture infrastructure and machinery, food processing and many more.
“These are available investments that can be pursued aside farming so that the whole value chain can be protected. MoFA strongly believes that Ghana’s current agricultural practices can be improved further till we have attained some level of food security” he said.
Mr. Osei Akoto indicated that, Ghana has developed the National Climate Smart Agriculture and Food Security Action Plan to serve as a vehicle for the country’s implementation of the agriculture and food security agenda.
The National Climate-Smart Agriculture and Food Security Action Plan was launched in 2016 as a policy document to deliberately programme climate-smart agricultural practices in the country till 2020.
As the National Climate Change Policy provides a broad framework for formulating specific strategies to address local climate change challenges, the National Climate-Smart Agriculture and Food Security Action Plan which is expected to reach its target by December 2020, is a twin effort to translate to the ground, the broad national goals and objectives in climate-smart agriculture.
By Wisdom Jonny-Nuekpe
