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By Anita Ankrah
Ghana will in few months set up a fertiliser production plant for local production of fertilisers to meet the rising demand of farmers in the country, Technical Advisor on agriculture at the presidency, Ms. Nana Serwaa Amoako has said.
“Processes is about 95 per cent complete and fertiliser production plant would be in operation in few months as the vision of developing home grown fertiliser expansion organisation programme is moving in the right direction”.
Ms Amoako stated this during the Fertiliser Research and Responsible Implementation (FERARI) coordination conference yesterday in Accra, themed ‘Global Fertiliser and Food Crisis: Mitigation Strategies for Ghana’.
The conference aimed at looking at the issues with fertiliser in the country and the way forward with the situation.
Ms Amoako noted that, the global fertiliser issue was pressing and needed a long-term solution to getting fertilisers to farmers.
She also acknowledged efforts of government to introducing a programme since 2018 on how to expand the fertiliser sector.
“For the long-term plans,the Ghana government has taken fertiliser to a different level by bringing up the Ghana fertiliser expansion programme where a set of team work to develop feasibility studies to develop a fertiliser manufacturing plant using our local natural gas,” she said.
The program director of FERARI, Dr Prem Bindraban who was excited in supporting the Ghana government implement its programme said it was necessary as the programme would impact more in reaching to more farmers.
He said the current fertiliser and food crisis underlined the importance of the responsible use of fertiliser resources to enhance the resilience of the food system.
“We want to work with the Ghana government because it has policies that would increase productivity, the first thing we have to do is to build on capacity, in that regard, we are working with seven institutions, five universities and two research centres in Ghana,” he said.
FERARI is an international public-private partnership that builds science-based approaches to site-specific fertilisation strategies for widespread adoption by farmers in Ghana for improved food and nutrition security.
Again, FERARI operates in conjunction with the Programme Planting for Food and Jobs of the Government of Ghana (PFJ-GoG) to embed development efforts into national policy priorities to reach impact at scale.
FERARI also helps the PFJ-GoG to establish a Ghana National Fertiliser Platform, develops its soil mapping expertise toward an information platform.