It Is Shameful To Spend $2 Million Each Week Buying Onions – Agric Minister

Dr Bryan Acheampong, the Minister in charge of Food and Agriculture, has revealed that traders using the Niger route import onions for $2 million each week.

The minister claims that, in light of the nation’s wealth, this is embarrassing.

“I deemed this as an embarrassment and a needless drain on our scarce foreign exchange”.

However, the Minister claims that the traders are eager to switch from import to local production and trading under the irrigation plans for the nation set up by the Ministry of Food and Agriculture.

At the second phase of the Planting for Food and Jobs (PFJ) launch in Tamale, the minister made this information public.

The Minister claims that given the wealth of resources the nation possesses, this should not be the case.

He continued by saying that, in order to address the larger potential, PFJ phase 2 has been created as a daring, inventive, and all-encompassing method to confront the challenges facing the nation’s road toward food security.

Dr. Acheampong further underlined that all the farmer needs to use PFJ 2.0 is access to land; everything else will be added.

With 1.2 million farmers projected to sign up in the first year, the PFJ phase 2 impact is anticipated to be in the area of job generation.

The Program is expected to create an average of 210,000 new farm-related jobs over the course of the following four years.

This won’t include additional occupations throughout the agricultural value chains, which are thought to total 420,000 each year on average during the same time span.

The PFJ phase 2 is anticipated to assist farmers, particularly large-scale farmers, with land development so that huge scales can help the exportation of produce to earn cash.

In a related development, the Patriotic Onion Sellers of Ghana say if Ghana does not intervene quickly to ensure Niger’s borders are open, many of its members will be out of business.

This is because many of its produce have rotten at the borders whilst bankers are chasing them for repayment of loans.

A spokesperson for the Association, Yakubu Akpeniba said, Burkina which could have been the escape route has been taken over by Jihadists escalating the situation.