Attract youth into farming

Story: Ama Amankwah Baafi

A COMMERCIAL farmer and exporter of horticultural products, Mr Albert Amponsah, has called on local government authorities to devise ways of making farming attractive to the youth in their localities since the venture has the solution to the country’s unemployment problem.

Mr Amponsah, who has been farming and exporting a good quantity of pineapples, pepper and other vegetables to Europe and Asia, said farming was a lucrative business which should be supported, and the youth encouraged to engage in it.

He told the Daily Graphic in an exclusive interview on his farm at Amanfrom, near Nsawam in the Eastern Region, that every local assembly should identify crops that grew well in their localities, support their cultivation with research and capital, while re-orienting the youth to take interest in the trade, especially as agriculture had now become the sole preserve of the aged in the communities.

“The local assemblies need to come out with creative ways of making agriculture viable at the district level. There should be projects to attract the youth, and we can only attract them if farming is well supported,” he stressed.

Mr Amponsah prefers that the Youth-in-Agric programme, although laudable, was not limited to maize and a few grains. Rather, every district should identify the crops in which they had comparative advantage so that, with their knowledge and the appropriate soil type, they could make the best use of their resources.

“For example, in Nsawam, we have an advantage of growing pineapples, thus, the youth here will hardly take you seriously if you start a programme here that concentrates on maize,” he advised.

He explained that the country, in general, had enormous potential for growing horticultural products to feed the local market, as well as for export, but that had to be structured to enable each local area to concentrate on their strength.

Mr Amponsah took to farming right after his six form education in mid-1990s. He has gone on to subject his farming practices and procedures to international certification which has now opened the door for him to export directly to buyers mostly in Europe.

Albe Farms, name of Mr Amponsah’s farm, has consequently grown to the point where he employs five administrative assistants and 100 farmers, mostly out-grower farmers.

Mr Amponsah also called for a deepening of public-private partnerships in farming, explaining that such partnerships would help bridge the gap between the differing priorities of the government and the private sector, which in many cases were not aligned for the same direction.

“Mostly, the private sector looks this way, and the government also, elsewhere. When this happens, the shared benefits that should come with the use of national resources does not accrue to all,” the commercial farmer intimated.

He said the partnerships could be developed along the agricultural value chain from inputs to the growing of crops, storage, transportation, processing and marketing, adding that such partnerships would also crush the bureaucracies associated with decision-making on issues that affected farming in the country.

The Albe Farms chief executive also wants regulatory authorities such as officials from the Ghana Export Promotion Authority (GEPA) to pay visits to their farms to familiarise themselves with their challenges, since the exporters forum alone could not address the issues holistically.