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The Agricultural Colleges Students Union of Ghana (ACSU), have given government a two-week ultimatum to resolve concerns they have raised or they will picket at the Ministry of Food and Agriculture.

At a press conference today [Tuesday] ACSU said the agricultural sector has not made any noticeable improvements towards development because the Ministry stopped employing trained extension officers.

In their view, the annual decline of GDP for agriculture and the inability of farmers to produce enough to feed the nation and provide raw materials for industry and export, are among the decline in the sector as outlined in their concerns. They also lamented over the extension worker to farmer ratio which currently stands at 1:3,000.

The role of extension officers in rural Ghana they stated was crucial because farmers in the rural areas are not technologically inclined.

‘’This situation of poor access to extension services in the country has led to poor agronomic practices, poor post-harvest management, insufficient use of inputs, over-use of pesticides, low adaptive capacity for use of research and technology and other information that could help increase productivity.

ACSU want government to also restore their scrapped allowances just like that of teacher and nursing trainees.

‘’The trainee allowances as a matter of urgency should be fully restored to have students go through the training.’’ They also touched on poor infrastructure at the various agricultural colleges indicating that the situation at these colleges leaves little to be desired ‘’as all that we can be seen are broken down implements, old lecture halls with cracks, deplorable halls of residence for trainees and lecturers alike.’’

‘’This has largely been due to the neglect on the part of the Ministry of Food and Agriculture concerning the woes of agricultural trainees an d the state of the colleges as a whole,’’ a statement from the students read.

Most of the colleges they noted do not have proper means of transportation and lack necessary logistics for effective training, teaching and learning.

The students have no option to rent commercial buses to embark on field trips and other related agricultural programmes, the students lamented.

‘’There should be a necessary improvement of the deplorable infrastructure existing in the various colleges. The Ministry should see to providing the colleges with school buses in broken down and outmoded tractors and other machinery in the colleges should be replaced.’’

They also called on government to absorb the few graduates who successfully complete the college programmes to enable the farmers and the tax payer reap the full benefits of the investment in the trainees to add to the economy positively.

They charged government to initiate discussion on how best the issues could be addressed as soon as possible with the involvement of the appropriate stakeholders concerned including our human resource directorate, lecturers, the student leadership and unemployed agricultural college graduates,’’ the statement concluded.