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| Ghanaian Ministers, MPs to take to farming |
9/23/2005 |
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The Government of Ghana has decided to allocate part of its land banks meant for oil palm and cassava plantations to Members of Parliament, Ministers and deputy Ministers to go into large-scale farming.
Each interested person would be allocated up to 100 acres of land.
They would also be provided with further support in the form of seedlings, clearing of the land, planting and maintenance of the farms over the next four years.
The idea is to give what the government describes as respectability to farming, in order to increase public interest and promote farming.
“We need to send a clear signal to our people that we need to take farming very serious and to show that farming is a profitable venture,” Minister for Private Sector Development and President''s Special Initiatives (PSI), Kwamena Bartels (MP) told journalists yesterday.
Beneficiaries of the initiative are expected to start paying back government''s investment in the project in the fifth year.
“We are also looking at the possibility of extending this initiative to the PSI on salt, garment and textiles,” Mr. Bartels.
He said a consortium of three companies were to sign a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) to set up three cassava starch processing companies at Atebubu, Amantin and Ejura.
These companies, he said, would process 20,000 metric-tonne capacity to process cassava into food-grade starch and ethanol for the petroleum industry.
On the garments and textiles sector, Mr. Bartels said under the PSI, $4million worth of garments had been manufactured, while a centre had also been set up in Accra to train 300 machine operators each month. He asked those in the textile industry to complement, the government''s efforts at making the sector more vibrant by improving on their managerial skills, as well as replacing old machinery.
Mr. Bartels said the longer such companies used obsolete equipment, the more their cost of production went up, adding that was bound to affect their operational cost and make their products uncompetitive.
The managers and board of the Venture Capital Fund, a fund meant to support small-scale enterprises, would be put in place by the end of the month.
Mr. Bartels said the fund had yielded up to ¢200 billion and gave the assurance that when the managers and board were in place, the money would be disbursed to the beneficiaries.
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