Close to $2 million have been invested by the Competitive African Rice Initiative (CARI), a German Ministry of Economic Co-operation and stakeholders’ initiative, to support rice farmers in Ghana.
The move is expected to improve their livelihoods by increasing the competitiveness of domestic rice to meet the increasing regional demand.
The investment would also see to the increment of productivity and quality of paddy rice, increase the efficiency of local rice sourcing, processing and marketing.
Rice farmers in Ghana are over 700,000, who make only 30% in investment returns --- a phenomenon driving most of them out of business.
The loss of market share of domestically produced rice and the inability to capture higher prices vis-a-vis imported rice put downward pressure on the income of smallholder rice producers.
At CARI’s stakeholders’ conference, former President of Ghana, John Agyekum Kufuor, the patron of the Kufuor Foundation, a supporting partner of CARI, called on government to develop the right policies for Ghana’s rice industry.
He said statistics show Ghana currently produces about 350,000 tonnes a year, as it constitutes about 30 to 40% of the rice consumption of 800,000 tonnes annually.
Currently, smallholder rice yields are quite low at 1 to 1.5 metric tonnes per hectare, which further affects incomes.
Key bottlenecks in the rice value chain include, but are not limited to, lack of irrigated land, poor access to quality seed material, farmers’ inability to pay for necessary inputs, sub-standard agricultural practices and cropping techniques, poor post-harvest handling, and lack of mechanisation, which would decrease unit costs.
The objective of CARI is to significantly improve the livelihoods of rice farming smallholder households in selected countries in the sub-region by increasing competitiveness of domestic rice supply to meet increasing regional demand.
The CARI programme is confident that by the end of 2017, the programme can be scaled up with the right systems and strong collaborations with its partners, leading to an improvement in the incomes and livelihoods of rice farmers and building sustainable solutions for the rice industry as a whole.
Technoserve, an indigenous partner, is implementing a cohesive package of activities that will contribute to addressing primary bottlenecks in the Ghanaian rice value chain.
The initiative supports rice farmers earning less than $2 per day in Nigeria, Ghana, Tanzania and Burkina Faso.
The aim is to double farmers’ income to $4 per day and to sustain farmers, their families and regions.
Rice farmers are, therefore, receiving money from a fund to increase productivity and qualification of paddy rice.
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