Mr Abubakari Ayuba, Project Manager with ActionAid Ghana, a non-governmental organisation (NGO), has urged the government to invest in the manufacturing of organic fertiliser in Ghana.
Mr Ayuba, who is in charge of the Northern Ghana Integrated Development Initiative (NGIDP), a four-year climate change adaptation project, said the use of organic fertiliser was part of an adaptation strategy aimed at lowering carbon emissions and encouraging sustainable ecological agriculture.
“We are calling on government to move away from subsidising synthetic fertiliser and putting that funds into the production of compost or organic fertilizer, so that we will have more infrastructure for the production of compost for our farmers”, he said.
Mr Ayuba made the statement on Wednesday in Wa, the capital of the Upper West Region, on the occasion of a regional stakeholders’ workshop on the implementation of climate change adaptation policy.
The purpose of the conference was to assess the impact of the NGIDP implementation in the Northern, Savannah, Upper West, and Upper East regions over the last three years, as well as to solicit participants’ opinions on climate change adaptation methods for national level consultation with government.
Mr Ayuba explained that imported synthetic fertilisers were occasionally unavailable on the market, and that farmers had been struggling for sufficient fertiliser for crop production in the country for the past two years.
We need to develop our systems to get internal farm inputs we can rely on, to introduce more climate adaptation programmes as well as target small holder women farmers and make them, more resilent to climate change”, he said.
According to studies, Ghana loses GH€200 billion every year due to climate change-related concerns such as floods and droughts, which harm agriculture and result in the loss of human lives.
We at ActionAid have researched the country’s recently revised Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) and discovered that the government of Ghana has 13 climate adaptation programmes and 34 climate change mitigation programmes,” he said.
He explained that because Ghana did not emit as much carbon as the Western world, the country could consider expanding its interventions to include the poor and vulnerable, such as small-scale farmers.