Ghana on track to become food-sufficient by 2029 – Bryan Acheampong

The Minister for Food and Agriculture, Bryan Acheampong, has disclosed that Ghana is progressing steadily towards achieving self-sufficiency in ten key food crops by 2029.

He disclosed that the government has been able to achieve and maintain its agricultural targets in the past year and hopes to keep improving them in the upcoming years.

Bryan Acheampong told Bernard Avle on the Citi Breakfast Show on Citi FM on Wednesday, March 13, that all targets set for 2023 were met except for poultry.

“The strategy that we set out on Planting for Food and Jobs and the invitation that we gave to Ghanaians to follow us on a five-year journey to food resilience, we are on track and we were able to meet our targets since 2023 on ten crops, except for poultry.

“In 2024, we are bent on meeting those food targets and when we are done with that and follow the trajectory, in five years, Ghana will be food self-sufficient in ten foods.

“Our production for tomatoes, for instance, in 2023, was 450,000 metric tonnes. We did a lot of dry season tomato farming last year and we invited the tomato queens who go to Burkina Faso to join hands to do dry season tomatoes so that we can bring the tomato that is produced in Ghana to support the system and that is why the price increase is not that significant.”

He added that the government intends to increase tomato production from 27 percent to 35 percent and intends to incentivise farmers to achieve this.

“Currently, we are about 27% for tomatoes and we want to move to 35% and we want to incentivise the tomato farmers to go back into tomato farming and you don’t achieve those targets overnight.”