While Ghana’s services sector continues to grow at a fast rate—the same cannot be said about the agricultural sector which employs about 44.7 percent of the working population.
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Among one of the key factors militating against the growth of the sector as stakeholders have identified is the over-reliance on rain to cultivate crops which has resulted in lower yields in times of drought.
In 2015, whereas the services sector grew by 5.1 percent, it also increased in size to 54.4 percent in the same year, relative to the 51.9 percent size in the national economic basket it occupied in 2014. Agriculture sector on the other hand grew by 2.4 percent in 2015 and shrank in size to 20.3 percent, compared with the 21.5 percent size it recorded in the previous year.
To worsen an already bad situation, investment by government into the sector continues to dwindle in spite of the pledge by government to invest part of its petroleum revenue in agriculture modernization.
Ishmael Ackah, head of Policy Unit at the Africa Center for Energy Policy (ACEP) said the misapplication of money meant for the agriculture sector is one of the factors leading to low performance in the sector.
In 2014, 170,62 million Ghana cedis or 43.91 million U.S. dollars was allocated to the agriculture sector from oil revenues.
“Out of this amount 69 percent went into sea defence projects,” Ackah disclosed during an Agricultural Policy Dialogue organized by ACEP with support from global charity Oxfam.
The forum was organized to analyse how much of oil revenue has so far been invested in agriculture and its impact on production in general. It was also aimed at making policy proposals to government and its stakeholders as to how to address challenges hampering the growth of the sector.
It is estimated that a little over half 51.5 percent of households in Ghana own or operate a farm, where faming is mostly rural, engaging about 83 percent of rural households. ■