The Upper East Region has the capability of producing rice to feed the entire country. This would be after the rehabilitation and utilisation of all the major dams and irrigation plots around them.
The Upper East Regional Minister, Stephen Yakubu said this when he took his turn at the State of the Region Report series at the Ministry of Information’s Press Centre in Accra.
“To conclude on the Agricultural sector, let me state that, these Irrigation Schemes (Tono, Tamne, Vea & Pwalugu Multi-Purpose Dam if completed) have the capacity to produce rice to feed the whole country.”
“And as we are worried about the amount of money being spent to import tomatoes from Burkina Faso, an improved tomato variety has been developed and very soon, no tomatoes will be imported from Burkina Faso. This will form part of measures to curb the depreciation of our cedi,” he said.
Stephen Yakubu continued to say, “even the Fumbisi valley alone, if well managed, can feed the whole country with rice. We do not need to spend millions of dollars that are hard to get to import rice.”
The Minister invited investors to the region to boost local food production.
Earlier, the Upper East Regional Minister, Stephen Yakubu disclosed that close to 60,000 cockerels, keets, layers and ruminants have been distributed to farmers in the Upper East Region as part of the government’s Rearing for Food and Jobs programme.
Rearing for Food and Jobs (RFJ) is one of the modules of the government’s flagship agricultural program christened Planting for Food and Jobs (PFJ). The RFJ is a five-year programme running from 2019 to 2023.
Source: A1radioonline.com|101.1MHz|Mark Kwasi Ahumah Smith|Ghana
