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The PFJ was introduced to encourage Ghanaians to take farming more seriously than in the recent past and aims to make farming once more a respectable and profitable venture and create jobs.
The Ghana Statistical Service released its Annual GDP figures and it shows that the country's agriculture sector – grew by 4.6 percent in 2019, a 0.2 percentage point decline from that of 2018, making it the slowest growth since growth jumped to 6.1 percent in 2017 from the 2.9 percent it recorded the previous year.
The 2019 growth of 4.6 percent was also the least recorded in all three sectors of the economy, as industry and services grew at 6.4 percent and 7.6 percent respectively.
The Agriculture sector has constantly trailed the other two sectors in growth – with the exception of 2015 when it surpassed industry by 1.2 percentage points.
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In spite of the clear indications of challenges of the PFJ, especially at a time government seems to be making some investments in agriculture, the sector considered as the backbone of the economy is declining and deliberate measures must be implemented despite Minister for Agriculture Owusu Afriyie-Akoto said Ghana has enough food in the store.
There have been fears that there would be food insecurity and shortages in the country.
Professor Emmanuel Bobobee, an agriculture engineer and an associate professor at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST), said until investors come to inject huge capital and take agriculture as a business, nothing much can be gained from the sector irrespective of whatever intervention is made by the government.
The Professor in an interview with B&FT said "They say the private sector is the engine of growth, and in agriculture, all the farmers are from the private sector; but they are smallholder farmers. We are talking about big capital entrepreneurs coming to invest in the sector. For example, when you look at South Africa some smallholder farmers there have farms the size of about 500 hectares. They have taken agriculture as a business and we have taken it as a way of life, so we approach it differently.
"The banks are not supporting the sector so there is no credit facility to expand. But we can’t blame the banks that much, because they cannot finance smallholder farmers who rely on hoes and cutlasses to farm. And because most farms are of small nature, all the research that we are doing in the area of high-yielding varieties is not translating into massive results because these smallholders do not have the motivation to expand."