The minister for Food and Agriculture, Dr Afriyie Owusu Akoto during a working visit to the Upper East Region charged farmers to financially prepare as the government subsidized fertilizer will soon be the puffy-financial-muscle farmers. The presidential hopeful made the disclosure when the chairman of the Federation of Water Users Association and a member of Irrigation Company of Upper Region – Robert Kwame Abokah pleaded on him to assist farmers in the region with farmers equiptments such as tractors, power trailers as well as fertilizer.
The kwadaso former Member of Parliament revealed that “lets me tell you in Ghana we don’t produce fertilizer. Everything is imported, the world fertilizer prices has gone up as much as three times. Urea which you needed last year, this time it was three hundred and ten dollars per metric ton when it lands at the port of Tema, do you know that it cost thousand two hundred dollars now? from three hundred and ten dollars to thousand two hundred dollars. so, and the whole world there is shortage of fertilizer.
we are only doing you a favor by this subsidy just to introduce you so you can adopt fertilizer and improve seed technology, now you know it and so you know the profit that you make out of this, if you apply improved seed fertilizer, you get three full times more yield and you should be the first witness for that, but that you don’t talk about every time you are talking about government, government and government is you and me what we collect in taxes that we are given to you, so it’s just a privilege and if the world price has gone up you should be able to bear the cost, but as Ghanaian we have this mentality about everything government.
you want roads, you want free roads, you want that, you want this, you want free education and yet you don’t want to pay for it, that’s the irony of it. so please this year the subsidy cannot be what it was in the previous years because it gone up three, four times in the world market and government hasn’t got the money to absorb all that difference, so you should be prepared to pay higher price in accordance with what is pertains on the world market period! so don’t talk to me about fertilizer at this stage, let’s talk about something I can do for you “.
He however assured that government will import farming machinery for land preparations from China, Brazil and India in 2022 so as to support yield improvement of farmers.
Gaspard Ayuureneeya.