By: Adnan Adams Mohammed
Malnutrition and signs of poverty are easily identified among the people of northern Ghana as you travel across the regions.
Data from a research by OpenStreetMap (OSM) has shown that more than 70% of rural households in the northern region of Ghana are food insecure and malnourished.
This is despite global effort to achieve food security and improved nutrition, particularly among rural households in developing countries. Yet, rural household food insecurity and undernourishment have been major developmental challenges to governments of many developing countries including Ghana.
These are further aggravated by the growing security instability due to ethnic clashes and remnants of terror attack fears from neighboring Burkina Faso.
While, food security is a phenomenon resulting from multiple causes which are food availability, food accessibility, food utilization and food stability. Agricultural growth, in most developing countries like Ghana, has been the major driver of poverty reduction.
To confirm the veracity of the hardship, the 2020 Comprehensive Food Security and Vulnerability Analysis (CFSVA) has indicated that, Food insecurity in Ghana is concentrated in the five northern regions of the country. The regional breakdown rate of vulnerability is given as: Upper East (48.7%); North East (33%); Northern (30.7%); Upper West (22.8%); and Savannah (22.6%).
The CFSVA survey undertaken by the Ghana Statistical Service (GSS) in collaboration with Ministry of Food and Agriculture (MOFA), with financial and technical assistance by World Food Programme (WFP) and Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO) of the United Nations, further indicated that, the 5 regions which have highest level of food insecurity are also the areas most prone to adverse weather conditions, such as perennial floods as a result of spillover of the Bagre dam in Burkina Faso and severe droughts as those part are typical savanna areas, which does not favor the rain-fed farming mostly practiced by the people of the north.
Yet, a study, authored by A. Bawa of Tamale Technical University and published by the Asian Journal of Agricultural Extension Economics & Sociology, estimated that, “about 97.5% of households are engaged in crop farming in northern Ghana.”
An indication that agricultural production is the main activity in the northern sector of Ghana, practiced mainly on seasonal and subsistence level. The people are mostly engaged in crop farming such as maize, rice, sorghum, soy beans, cowpea, cassava, yam, cotton and vegetables, with few households engaging in poultry, livestock and pig rearing.
A typical subsistence agriculture means, households farming for their own consumption and for the market. Based on the Ghana Living Standards Survey (GLSS), Ghanaian households show notable differences in employment and welfare across regions, with the northern regions having the lowest per capita incomes.
As already indicated, agriculture sector is the largest source of employment for the people of northern Ghana as almost 98% of households are engaged in smallholder farming. These farmers are challenged human resource and managerial skills, natural resource management, technology development and food insecurity.
This, is evident by the CFSVA survey which revealed that, households that depend mainly on agriculture as their source of household income, unskilled labour, household heads who are less educated and remittances dependent households are more likely to be food insecure.
According to the Ghana Strategy Support Programme (GSSP), promoting agricultural growth will have a great effect on reducing poverty at the regional level because of the strong linkages between income and consumption.
“However, after years of sustained concentration of development aid and NGO operations, entrenched poverty remains pervasive in northern Ghana, with significant implications for rural livelihoods”, Benjamin Kwao noted in a recent publication.
“Enhanced governmental support to agriculture in the form of service provision is vital to the growth and productivity of smallholder farmers. Although, there have been deliberate effort by governments increase support to the agricultural sector such as; provision of irrigation, agricultural credit, input subsidy, agricultural extension and mechanization services to smallholders aimed at improving farmers’ access to these services in order to improve agricultural productivity and rural livelihoods.
“Notwithstanding the critical role of access to services in agricultural production and productivity, many small-scale farmers in Ghana and other developing countries have limited access to these services. Majority of agricultural producers in developing countries are peasants who live in remote communities with limited access to most agricultural services. Poor road infrastructure, long distances to farms, and inaccessibility to many service providers are constraints that hinder many smallholder farmers from accessing agricultural services”, the researcher noted.
The governments is therefore asked to improve road infrastructure, and offer logistical support to service providers to enable them to reach farmers in remote places. But, the critical challenge is how to ensure that services are made accessible to farmers to enhance farm performance and food security.
