A member of the Food and Agriculture Committee of Parliament and MP for Suaman in the Western North Region, Hon Joseph Betino, has said the cocoa farming sector of the country would further get deteriorated in terms of sustainability as the 2023 budget woefully failed to provide solutions to the challenges.
According to him, the cocoa industry is teetering on the edge of collapse, as cocoa farm trees that were cut down by the government with the hope of introducing a new hybrid system have failed.
He said, the farmland of cocoa that was cut down is now lying in fallow and weeds have taken over and farmers become hopeless as to when they would have their farms back.
Hon Betino was commenting on the 2023 budget in an interview with EXPRESSNEWSGHANA in parliament.
He said the government has failed to make adequate provisions in the 2023 budget to tackle the multiple challenges facing the cocoa sector.
“I remembered somewhere last two years or so, the government came up with a policy to replace all cocoa farm trees due to the swollen pocks diseases. many farmers lose their cocoa and were expecting that the program will be implemented, but as we speak, the farmlands are empty and weeds have taken over. Most of the farmers have no money to hire labours,” the MP bemoaned.
He also called on the government to tackle the cocoa road sector this paper looks at the social, economic, and environmental effects of such initiatives many of the cocoa roads have become inaccessible and farm produces get loss in farmlands.
The MP said, several cocoa road projects linking cocoa communities within the Constituency have been abandoned after the change of government in 2017 and have since not received any form of grading and reshaping, stressing that, the poor road network is affecting the living standards of his constituents and Ghana as a whole.
He added that despite other economic earnest, Cocoa still remains the lead foreign exchange earner of the country and yet roads leading to the cocoa-producing communities were in a very poor state.
The MP could not understand why such economic roads some of which were awarded to improve cocoa production in the country should be abandoned, especially in a cocoa session, where dry cocoa beans need to be transported to marketing centres.
He stressed some of these roads on daily basis are like passing through hell and that each day, motorists and commuters groan on the road.
It’s a regular occurrence for cocoa farmers, commuters, and motorists, in general, to fall into the murky and dusty perpetually domiciled on the roads.
Source: sacredmediaonline.com/
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