“Harvesting, threshing and winnowing of paddy rice by small scale rice farmers in the Hohoe Municipality has become more laborious and time consuming, leading to massive post-harvest losses, which reduces our incomes as well. Because of the obsolete way it is harvested and threshed before reaching the market, the amount lost in the process is phenomenal,” says Mr George Agbemavor, a rice farmer based at Gbi Wegbe in the Hohoe Municipality.
Mr Agbemavor, who cultivated 50 acres of rice last year, observed that labour was what took most of the resources and time of rice farmers.
“ I will be happy if the government could bring in more farm equipment to reduce the tedium and expense in using manual labour in order to attract the youth into agriculture, ” Agbemavor said.
He said the bumper harvest recorded by rice farmers had been eroded by the laborious harvesting and threshing processes they had to undertake to bring their produce to the market.
The government of Ghana spends a lot of money on the importation of rice for local consumption. This is against the background that the country has the capacity and resources to be self-reliant in rice production.
Past and present governments have realised this all along and have been taking steps to ameliorate the situation but to no avail. An example of the steps is the establishment of irrigation projects for large scale rice production at such places as Dawhenya, Afife, Kpong and Asutsuare.
But these projects, which were undertaken under various governments, could not survive the demise of the regimes that established them.
During the rice farming season in July, Madam Adzo Kemetse, a rice farmer based at Santrokofi-Benua, near Hohoe, and her family migrated from their home to communities where they could find swampy fields on lease for rice cultivation.
Madam Kemetse said even though the peasant farmer could produce enough rice, most Ghanaians preferred buying the imported one.
“Go to a rice field and you will find trees and other objects which will make it very difficult to use tractor services. As such, manual labour is employed. So a job which can be done in a few hours takes days to complete, ” she lamented.
And because sometimes the labour is not available or very difficult to obtain, there are problems that affect the crops during harvesting.
Harvesting, threshing and winnowing are the most problematic because if they are not done at a specific time, there is the likelihood one could experience post-harvest losses, she said.
For this reason, she said, rice farmers travelled as far as the northern part of the region to look for labour. The labour comes with a problem. The men come with their wives and children and the farmers have to look for accommodation for them, feed them three times a day and provide them with medical care when they get sick.
“After the harvesting, the farmer looks for another set of labourers to come and pick the harvested rice from the ground and prepare it for threshing. This is a critical part of the process because if not picked quickly, they might germinate because the ground is wet and marshy, ” she said.
This accounts for the high cost of labour and drudgery leading to post-harvest losses of about 30 per cent annually.
It was no wonder that the farmers were happy when the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), in collaboration with FINATRADE, procured a combined harvester, a planter and a seeder worth $ 40,000 for them.
Being a big boost, this will really assist the rice farmers a lot in their farming activities.
With the seeder, the rice seeds will be made to germinate before being transferred to the planter which plants in lines. When the plants are ready for harvesting, the combined harvester comes in handy to harvest and bag the produce.
This gesture was facilitated last year by ADCI/VOCA, which organised the farmers in the Hohoe Municipality into groups on a pilot basis, gave them training in good agricultural practices and supported them to increase their yield with credit facilities from a local rural bank and supplied them with agricultural inputs.
The organisation did not only support the farmers but also introduced them to new varieties of rice, which are comparable to what is imported and sold on the market.
Apart from this, FINATRADE, a Ghanaian trading firm, assured the farmers of ready market for their produce.
According to the firm, they were ready to buy any quantity of rice the farmers could produce provided the quality was good and met the requirement of the Ghanaian consumer.
Mr Ben Dadzie, a senior agronomist and a consultant with ACDI/VOCA, says the biggest problem facing rice production in the country is getting the best varieties such as the Togo Marshal and Viwonor and improving on efficiency in the cultivation process.
The Togo Marshal is white rice and popular on the market whilst Viwonor is red.
“If these two can be tackled, Ghana will have no problems, ” he said.
As a result of the initiative, “84 rice farmers, comprising 75 out-growers and nine nucleus farmers with farm sizes ranging from two to 50 acres were mobilised to cultivate 438 acres of low land rice in the Hohoe Municipality last year, ” he said.
Out of a target of 2,000 tonnes of rice earmarked for the season, he said, an initial total of 1,604 tonnes of paddy rice harvested had been transported to the Praire Volta Ltd at Aveyime for milling and onward delivery to FINATRADE.
“This season, in July, the project has increased the number of farmers and the area under cultivation to 2,500 acres in support of the government’s policy of increasing local rice production and reducing rice importation”, Mr Dadzie said.
“I have always been advising these farmers to see agriculture as a big venture and am happy that the region has witnessed a boost in rice production, ” said Bessa Akpalu, an official of the Ministry of Food and Agriculture (MOFA).
Mr Akpalu said very soon the Ministry of Food and Agriculture (MOFA) would facilitate the cultivation of rice in the municipality by removing the stumps to enable the farmers to fulfil their promise of feeding half of the nation with rice.
Efo Kumah Ameyibor, Operation Manager of Green Shield Agro-Chemicals, expressed optimism that the troubles faced by these farmers would one day be over.
He wondered whether the prices of the local varieties would be the same as the imported rice even if the municipality could put the same varieties of rice on the market. He was so concerned because the mode of producing the local rice was not efficient.
He said the only way forward after the introduction of the right varieties was to remove all the stumps in the rice fields to ensure that those tractors, planters and harvesters could be used to facilitate production.
With the provision of the seeder, combine harvester and other equipment, if the stumps are removed and the right varieties of rice are provided Ghana can achieve efficiency in production, attract competitive prices, and then talk of reducing the importation of rice.
No comments:
Post a Comment