Amansie West farmers get hybrid cocoa seedlings

Story: George Ernest Asare, Kumasi
13/03/08


THE Millennium Villages Project (MVP) is to provide 500,000 hybrid cocoa seedlings valued at GH¢50,000 to farmers in the Amansie West District in the Ashanti Region to replant their old, unyielding farms.
The move is to help develop the cocoa industry and reduce extreme poverty in the farming communities in the district.
The Agriculture and Environment Co-ordinator of the MVP, Mr Isaac Kankam-Boadu, disclosed this at a capacity workshop for 24 cocoa farmers and two agricultural extension agents from a cluster of communities in the Amansie West District.
The workshop was aimed at assisting the participants to manage their farms effectively.
The beneficiary farmers were also expected to take advantage of the workshop to maximise productivity and improve their incomes.
The workshop dubbed “Farmers Field School,” focused on building farmers’ capacity to enable them to make well-informed crop management decisions through increased knowledge and understanding of the agro-ecosystem.
It was organised by the MVP in collaboration with the Sustainable Tree Crop Programme (STCP) and supported by the Cocoa Research Institute of Ghana (CRIG).
Some of the topics treated were agro-ecosystem analysis and nursery management of cocoa, seed selection, transplanting, soil fertility and management, pruning and thinning, black pod and capsid management and facilitation skills.
The beneficiary farmers were expected to be the main facilitators in their respective communities on crop management.
The aim is to ensure that as many farmers as possible benefit from their training to enhance productivity and thereby maximise income generation to reduce extreme poverty among cocoa farmers.
The FFS has been applied to tree crops by the STCP and farmers are being encouraged to experiment on their own farms, to make their own decisions based on their observations and knowledge, through regular field visits.
The new technology is gaining root in countries like Nigeria, Cameroon, Cote d’Ivoire and parts of Ghana.
The MVP is a new bottom-up approach, aimed at lifting villages in developing countries out of the poverty trap.
It also emphasises the principles of participation and empowerment of communities encouraging them to make decisions that positively enhance their future development, as well as support them to have access to resources that enable them to design, implement, monitor and evaluate projects they have initiated.
The beneficiary farmers and the agricultural extension officers were selected from communities in the Amansie West District described as “hunger hot spot” where residents experienced extreme poverty.
The communities have, however, demonstrated self-help spirit and the community initiated projects, which proved that, given the necessary support and assistance, they could lift themselves from extreme poverty and contribute more meaningfully towards sustainable national development.
Mr Kankam-Boadu urged the participants to return to their respective communities, ready to impart their newly acquired skills to other farmers, to enhance effective crop management.
He stated that by imparting their knowledge to other farmers in their communities, as many as 780 farmers would directly benefit from their training, thereby maximising cocoa production and income generation to reduce extreme poverty.
Mr Kankam-Boadu says although cocoa is very important to the national economy, many farmers at the Millennium Village Cluster are not deriving the optimum returns from their plantations.
According to him, this is due to the poor management of their crops, which in turn leads to poor harvest and low income generation.
Mr Kankam-Boadu added: "It is to improve the situation that the MVP was introduced to train farmers on good cocoa management practices and supply them with high yielding cocoa hybrids.”