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What happens when farming is treated as serious business? For Dr Isaac Kofi Adjei-Maafo, Australia provided him with an answer.
What happens when farming is treated as serious business?
For Dr Isaac Kofi Adjei-Maafo, Australia provided him with an answer.
Speaking to Kafui Dey, the former Agriculture Secretary reflected on what he observed about Australian farmers and what Ghana could learn from their agricultural system.
“They have a lot of respect for farmers,” he said.
But the respect, according to Adjei-Maafo, is not merely symbolic.
“Australian farmers, they don’t joke with them at all. And they are rich,” he said.
Then came the line that sharply contrasted his description of farming abroad with the struggles of many Ghanaian farmers:
“The farmers there are millionaires.”
The difference, he explained, is also about scale.
Australian farmers can operate on enormous tracts of land.
“They run thousands of acres of cotton or whatever they would be doing,” he said. “If it’s maize, you go in for the thousand, multiple, multiple thousand.”
And then he delivered the comparison that brought the conversation back home.
“They have the land.”
Ghana, he argued, also has land but access to it is a major obstacle.
“We also have the land,” Adjei-Maafo said, agreeing that Ghana’s land tenure system needs to be examined.
The problem, he explained, is ownership.
“We have land but it’s not easily available,” he said.
According to him, much of Ghana’s land is held by families in relatively small plots, making large-scale agricultural projects difficult.
“Families own land. And small, small plots,” he said.
For Adjei-Maafo, the consequence is serious.
“Then our agriculture is doomed to start at the beginning. We can’t do massive projects,” he argued.
His proposed direction is to make better use of government-owned land for large-scale agricultural ventures, noting that it is difficult in Ghana to find one individual with control over vast amounts of land.
The Australian example therefore became more than a story about wealthy farmers. For Adjei-Maafo, it was a lesson about land, scale, respect for farmers and the structure needed to make agriculture commercially powerful.
Ghana, he suggested, does not necessarily lack agricultural potential.
The bigger question is whether the country can organize its land and agricultural resources well enough to unlock it.
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