Effective 2027, Ghanaians will not go hungry again. How do I know? Simple: children of farmers eat three square meals a day. Our president is a farmer! Our Deputy Minister of Agriculture, John Dumelo, is a farmer.

At Yapei and Busunu in the Savannah Region, John Mahama has two farms, one for soya beans and maize. He sells his yellow maize to Asutsuare Farms which uses it for poultry feed. The other is a livestock farm, boasting some 500 goats and other small ruminants. Begun only five months ago, he plans to add on cattle and sheep.

Dumelo’s farm may not be the biggest in the world but it is big enough to warrant 100 employees.

How can we fail!

But we are in Ghana where birds fly backwards, where the ingredients for success manage to conspire to spell F-A-I-L-U-R-E.

Mahama and Dumelo are not the first top politicians who have gone into farming. Dating from the (P)NDC SMC era, we have had Commodore Steve Obimpeh (1996 to 1997); Kwabena Agyei (1997-1998); Courage Quashigah (2001-2005). They all had private farms. Indeed, Dr Owusu Afriyie Akoto, Agric Minister under Nana Akufo Addo, not only had a farm; he actually studied Agriculture to the highest academic level – a PhD.  

Only one exception: Colonel Frank Bernasko, arguably the most effective Agric Minister since 1957, who is credited with the success of Operation Feed Yourself.

So why, despite these, have we failed so miserably?

During the first media visit to his farm last December, President Mahama shared his pains as a farmer. The 2024 drought destroyed 40% of his crops, but for a friend who offered him a combine harvester, he would have lost everything.” With that experience, he has resolved “to go totally under irrigation”.

For his part, John Dumelo, as a farmer, identified the following problems, among others: Access to credit and land ownership.

This country has been talking about all of the above problems in agriculture for as long as I have been old enough to read newspapers and watch and listen to radio and television discussions by so-called agricultural experts with alphabets after their names.

We study Agriculture to PhD level and we have university demonstration farms. We even have a bank that lends to farmers.

So why do we go to bed hungry? Why do we import tomatoes and onions from countries that have been cursed with drought?

Time was when students were feeding from school farms. Wither did the school farms idea flee?

Even General Acheampong, with only a commercial school certificate and military academy qualifications, knew that nobody does agric without factoring in the transportation required to haul the produce from the farm gate. Wasn’t it a shame that under an Agric Minister with a PhD in Agriculture, government rented trucks to transport food from the farms to the Ministries in Accra!

Imagine!!

One of the seminal writings on the subject of Agric was one titled, GHANA MUST GO KIBUTZ. In that article, published in the ‘Daily Graphic’ in 2023, Frank Apeagyei, journalist and Public Relations consultant, prescribed the adoption of KIBBUTZ, the Israeli communal farming concept “in which the workforce gains access to farmlands that come with allodial title.”

He was at pains to point out that “in Kibbutz, workers become the absolute owner of the land on which they farm, complete with the produce.”

This has been responsible for the phenomenal success of this system in a country where more than half of the land is a desert.

With the benefit of first-hand experience (he was once Special Assistant at Major Courage Quarshigah’s Ministry of Agriculture), Apeagyei is convinced that “you cannot make a farmer out of a salaried worker.”

He argues; “The missing factor was that the workers did not own the land. They saw the farms as belonging to government and, therefore, not worth breaking their backs for.

What is his prescription? Simple, he writes, “the Government must take advantage of the benefits inherent in the State Lands Act, 1962 (Act 125) enacted by Kwame Nkrumah which provides for the acquisition of lands by Government, in the national interest, whenever it appears to the President so to do.”

Apeagyei suggests very strongly to the Government to “create a land bank for distribution of lands to the youth, the unemployed (NABCO and all) and the entrepreneurial class to go back to the land, along the lines of Kibbutzim.”

Outside of land ownership is the question of water source. To our collective shame, Ghana’s agriculture still depends on rain while we watch on, helpless, as excess water from Bagre and Weija dams flood rather than irrigate our farms.

Fortunately, we have a President who has been a victim of drought and has sworn to himself that the water factor in farming will be a thing of the past.

In Mahama’s presidency, farmers will not need to complain; the President knows all their needs.