CSIR-CRI forms consortium with farmers to enhance food security and improve farmers’ incomes

Though agriculture is the backbone of Ghana’s economy, the sector continues to face challenges in terms of access to affordable and productive technologies.

The situation often leads to low yields and decline in the income of most farmers, thus posing a threat to food security.

To make access to agriculture technologies easy and cheap, the Crops Research Institute of the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR-CRI) is forming a consortium with large scale farm enterprises to bridge the gap between technology development and utilization.

The difficulty in accessing agricultural technologies is not peculiar to Ghanaian farmers only, but other farmers in West and Central African countries.

To address this and enhance food security, the West and Central African Council for Agricultural Research and Development (CORAF), the World Bank through its Food Systems Resilience Project, and USAID have sponsored the formation of a consortium between Crops Research Institute and seven large scale farm enterprises to support the farmers.

Director-General of Council for Scientific and Industrial Research, Professor Paul Bosu indicated that, “we want to assist the farmers with the technologies that CSIR has developed over the years so that if we have high yielding, climate-resistant, and pest- resistant varieties, they will be able to adopt them. We will take them through quality seed production, and best agronomic practices as well. All things being equal, superior variety will mean higher yields, higher income and more food on the market.”

For the Technical Manager at CORAF iREACH, Dr Caroline Makamto Sogbui “this consortium is paving the way so that in the future, it will be easy for technology developed to get to the farmers. It means that the research institution, the farmers and private sector are going to work together to create enabling environment to facilitate the transfer of technology.”

Source:onuaonline.com