According to Bryan Acheampong, Minister of Food and Agriculture, Ghana is making steady progress toward becoming self-sufficient in 10 major food crops by 2029.
He revealed that the government aims to continue raising agricultural standards in the coming years, noting that they were able to meet and sustain them in the previous year.
On Wednesday, March 13, Bryan Acheampong informed Bernard Avle on the Citi Breakfast Show on Citi FM that all of the goals for 2023 had been reached, with the exception of poultry.
“The strategy that we set out on Planting for Food and Jobs and the invitation that we gave to Ghanaians to follow us on a five-year journey to food resilience, we are on track and we were able to meet our targets since 2023 on ten crops, except for poultry.
“In 2024, we are bent on meeting those food targets and when we are done with that and follow the trajectory, in five years, Ghana will be food self-sufficient in ten foods.
“Our production for tomatoes, for instance, in 2023, was 450,000 metric tonnes. We did a lot of dry season tomato farming last year and we invited the tomato queens who go to Burkina Faso to join hands to do dry season tomatoes so that we can bring the tomato that is produced in Ghana to support the system and that is why the price increase is not that significant.”
He continued by saying that the government wants to encourage farmers to reach this goal by raising tomato production from 27 to 35 percent.
“Currently, we are about 27% for tomatoes and we want to move to 35% and we want to incentivise the tomato farmers to go back into tomato farming and you don’t achieve those targets overnight.”
