Deputy Minister for Food and Agriculture John Dumelo has admonished farmers to thoroughly study the market before getting into any form of farming.
Speaking at the Agribusiness Launchpad 2.0, the deputy minister recounted how he once lost almost all his snails in business simply because they seem lucrative and he entered the market without knowing much about them.
“ So, I travel to US like 10 years ago, and I realised that the snails were like $2 or $3 for one.I said, ah, I just think there’s like one Cedi, two cedis in Accra. So, quickly I came back, set up a snail farm, put in like 30,000 snails.So, I calculated, I said, oh, within a year, I have a million snails.If I sell one for $1, that’s $1 million. I chopped down $1 million in my head already.Oh, two months after half, the 30,000 died.So, it’s going to be 15,000. Two months after the half died, 10,000 died.Now, it’s going to be 5,000 snails. So, what did I do? I ate my losses. The 5,000 left.I didn’t have any money left. The reason was, I didn’t take time to learn about snail farming. I was in a hurry. I looked at the numbers before the passion.” He added
John Dumelo also urged Ghanaians to patronize Made-In-Ghana products to help drive demand and create market for local farmers arguing that most of the problems farmers face is because they don’t have demand for their products.
“And so, that being said, I just hope and pray that everybody keeps on adding value to whatever it is. Let’s make Ghana a better place, and if we will do it, it is ourselves. Like now, most of the rice farmers are crying that they don’t have a market.But ask yourself, when was the last time you ate rice? And when was the last time you ate that rice that was Ghana rice? So, if half of the population says, tomorrow we are going to eat Ghana rice, the rice farmers will not have a problem because there will be the demand for it.Let’s make Ghana a great place. ” Dumelo stated
The Deputy Minister also outlined government efforts aimed at boosting tomato production and addressing the current shortfalls, adding that farmers in the North are currently being empowered to take up dry season farming to deal with the shortfall.
“To augment the shortfall of tomato production and also to balance it, we’ve partnered with some private institutions to get into a massive tomato production in the north, most especially in the Ohu West municipality, where I went there a couple of weeks ago,and there are over a thousand farmers there who are being prepared to do dry season farming. And so I think next year will be a very good year for the tomato industry in this country.” He stated
The Agribusiness Launchpad and Accelerator Program 2.0 is a three-day event that was organized by Impact Food Hub in partnership with Absa Bank Ghana and the GUBA Diaspora Network, with the aim of equipping agripreneurs and startups with scaling strategies, expert insights, and investor connections.
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