Ghana’s Ambassador to China, His Excellency Ambassador Edward Boateng has shared some notes on how Ghana and Africa as a whole, can recover its economy through agriculture.
Amb. Boateng, during a zoom interview on the Happy Morning Show to discuss the topic ‘Agriculture: Africa’s post Covid-19 recovery catalyst?’, implied that it is possible for agriculture to aid Africa greatly in its economic recovery but first, we have to find a new market for our products.
He named China as one potential market, the EU as another potential market and the North American market but he emphasized that most importantly, we need to focus on our own markets; the African markets because it still forms less than 5% of intra-African trade.
“We also need to address the supply side constraints, the processing, the storage, and several other issues which hamper our ability to sit at the table. Also, it is very important that we increase our productivity.
“If you look at the per acre yield, China is producing almost 8 to 10 times of per acre yield in Africa. The only African country where the per acre yield, especially in Sub-Saharan Africa is worth talking about is South Africa. If you take out South Africa, most of us have very low per acre yield”, he said.
Per his research, over the last hundred years, Ghana has only been able to probably double the production of cocoa from over half a million tons to about a million and that was even during the time of President Kuffuor and President Mills, and this has to be checked.
He concluded that Ghana is looking at how to engage the Chinese to come in on the agricultural side; on the production side, on the processing side, on the marketing side, and the distribution side because there is a huge opportunity, however, if we do not address the constraints, we will continue to be under the table instead of at the table.
By: Maureen Dedei Quaye