The Group organizer for tomato sellers at the Madina Market in the Greater Accra Region, Maame Sika has slammed the National Farmers Day celebration and called for its abolition because farmers have been neglected over the years.
According to her, whenever they travel to buy produce from the farmers in the villages, they pity them because they don't have a decent place to preserve the produce, “so they leave them on the farm for insects and pests to feed on and sell the rest to buyers.”
According to the organizer, they always get information that government has bought equipment and insecticides for farmers, but most of the deprived areas are neglected, with the authorities at the district level distributing the equipment to friends, relatives and political affiliates.
“I wish the government will cancel the Farmers Day celebration because what is there to celebrate when our farmers are not benefitting from it; you visit most of the farming communities in the country and you see farmers neglected leading them to struggle to get their own seedlings for planting and in the end you see government officials celebrating in grand style.”
She added that because the farmers do not preserve the vegetables before they are transported to their destinations, half of them usually go waste.
Other traders the paper spoke to also called for the abolishing of the Farmers Day celebration because it has failed to boost agricultural production in the country.
At the Agbogbloshie Market, Hannah Laliba, a yam seller said she had no idea about tomorrow's public holiday, a day set aside to celebrate farmers for being the bedrock of the economy because she has many challenges, including transportation of yam from the Northern Region and lack of storage facilities.
She added that government is not motivating the farmers to work hard because most of the crops in the country are imported to compete with the local ones.
According to her most of the farmers are relocating to Accra to trade because they are not able to feed their families with the little they earn.
Meanwhile, at a post-2016 budget workshop organized by the Ministry of Finance and the Institute of Economic Journalists in Accra, an economics expert at the University of Ghana, K. A Tutu predicted that looking at the way the economy is being managed; he sees the future of agriculture as bleak because of government's focus on the discovery of oil and gas in the country.
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