By Omotayo Edubi
Tono Irrigation Dam, in the Kassena-Nankana Municipality, Upper East Region of Ghana is ready to facilitate all year round farming, according to President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, who said, 13,190 hectares of additional irrigable land had been made available through the rehabilitation of Tono, Kpong Left Bank and Kpong Irrigation Schemes, for rice, maize and vegetable cultivation.
Akufo-Addo who announced this when delivering the State of the Nation’s Address said the project would benefit more than 14,200 smallholder farmers and create 40,000 jobs along with several value chain activities.
The Tono Irrigation Dam constructed in 1975 had not seen any major rehabilitation, resulting in the damage of the major parts of the facility and siltation challenges until 2018 when the Government secured $36 million for reconstruction work to begin on the facility.
Akufo-Addo said, “Immediate benefits arising from the scheme include improved rice yields increasing from 4.5 tons per hectare to 5.5 tons per hectare, leading to increased production and growth in farm incomes.”
He said that the Government, through the Ministry of Food and Agriculture, had recently engaged nine large scale investors in addition to smallholder farmers at the Kpong Left Bank Irrigation Project to cultivate rice, maize and vegetables, using modern production technologies.
The Government, he stated, had also invested in the vegetable sector, through the Ghana Peri-urban Vegetable Value Chain Project by providing irrigation infrastructure covering 541 hectares, in the Greater Accra Region.
Akufo-Addo said the construction of 80 warehouses, with a combined storage capacity of 80,000 metric tonnes, had been completed and would help address the challenge of post-harvest losses.
“There is no doubt that but for the vigorous interventions we have made in agriculture in the past five years, which have made us more self-reliant in our food needs,” he said.
Akufo-Addo said the country’s cocoa production increased to 1,047,385 tonnes, the highest ever recorded in Ghana’s history.
“Together with our counterparts in Cote d’Ivoire, we have addressed the inequalities in the international marketing system of cocoa by paying a Living Income Differential of $400 per tonne of cocoa to our farmers. This is a remarkable initiative that cushions the income of the Ghanaian cocoa farmer, the backbone of our economy.”
Akufo-Addo stated that a non-adjustable electronic weighing scale had been introduced for the purchase of cocoa from farmers.