In the abundance of water, the fool is thirsty

The bombing in Burkina Faso this week that tragically killed seven Ghanaian tomato traders and injured many others has resurrected the pitiful failure of agricultural policies by successive governments.

Contents

Why
Blaming demons

Monitoring radio and TV discussions by “experts”, including PhD, double-Masters degree holders and totally illiterate political footsoldiers on the issue, I am convinced that there is a demon assigned to Ghana tasked with making all our best policies in agriculture and industry unworkable.

Why

Why, for example, have we borrowed $36.25 million to build a sugar factory at Komenda and not tasted a cup of sugar from it since May 2016?

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The factory, designed to produce 125 tonnes of sugar daily and create over 7,000 direct and indirect jobs, is idle because there is no sugar cane to feed the factory.

It’s been 10 years, though it takes 12 to 16 months to grow and harvest sugar cane.

Chiefs have been approached who have offered thousands of hectares for the cultivation of the sugared grass.

Who is worried about jobless youth and idle sugar-cane farmers when party financiers have to make their millions importing sugar!

Talk of demons.

We experienced a glut in the production of rice, maize and eggs in 2025 and yet hunger has not abated and prices are still high.

During the first media visit to his farm in December 2025, freshly re-elected President Mahama shared his pains as a farmer.

He lamented that the 2024 drought destroyed 40 per cent of his crops and, 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”.

I thought out loud: what happened to the numerous irrigation schemes in Ghana?

General Acheampong’s SMC government (1972-78) is credited with initiating eleven large-scale irrigation schemes across Ghana, including the Libga scheme in the Northern Region, Aveyime and Afife dams (Volta Region), Okyereko and Kpong (Eastern), Dawhenya, Weija and Ashaiman (Greater Accra) Vea Irrigation Scheme (which supports Bolgatanga area) and Tono Irrigation Scheme.

Under Akufo Addo’s One Village One Dam, 560 dams were promised. By mid-2020, some 88 were fully completed and 437 were at various stages of completion.

The Mahama government’s resolve to reintroduce school farms reminds me of a story in the October, 2023 edition of the ‘Daily Graphic’. It read:

“The CSIR Institute of Industrial Research (IIR) has discovered a way to irrigate a farm from a distance.

The institute’s scientists have developed a mobile application (App) which enables farmers to remotely irrigate their farms from long distances.

“The remote-controlled irrigation device works with a borehole fitted with a submersible pump.

By means of solar panels, energy from the sun (i.e direct current or DC) is transported by means of a converter to alternating current (AC) and stored in dry cell batteries.
“The app turns on the pump through which water water the crops.”

The story was filed in 2023. I was there to see it demonstrated, but since then, it’s been silence.

Blaming demons

Talking about blaming demons, I remember that in 2016, a Deputy Minister of Agriculture was told that there was a shortage of cassava on the market. His reaction was that the report couldn’t be true.

Pressed with irrefutable evidence of cassava shortage, the Minister put the blame on two factors: one, “the remoteness of the production centres (farms) from the markets,” and two, “transportation”.

For a solution, the Deputy Minister kicked the ball into the court of the private sector, saying that the private sector had neglected its duty!

Dumbfounded, Yours Truly asked on this page in the ‘Daily Graphic’ of May 26, 2016: “Is it for talking and blame shifting that we pay our Ministers in excess of GH¢7, 200.00 a month (at the time) and chauffeur them around in air conditioned comfort?”

We study Agric to PhD level and we have university demonstration farms.

We even have a bank that lends to farmers.

So why do we still go to bed hungry?

Why do we import tomatoes and onions from countries that have been cursed with drought because of their geographical positioning?

To be fair to Mahama, one year may be considered too short for his policies to have kicked in.

Nonetheless, I wish his Deputy Agric Minister, the handsome charismatic John Dumelo will talk less if there is nothing to say.

In an interview with two Joy FM Super Morning Show hosts on Wednesday, he promised that his Ministry was testing some varieties of tomatoes for commercial adoption.

Perhaps he was not made to explain himself because, as far as I knew, this country had long gone past testing varieties.

The CSIR has worked on and produced tomato and other crop varieties which have been tested over time.

Bob Marley’s prophecy was spot on: in the abundance of water, the fool is thirsty.

Let this not be said about the effectiveness of your government, Mahama and Dumelo.