By Murtala Issah
An initiative to help smallholder farmers mitigate the impact of climate change is underway across twenty-two communities in six regions of Ghana.
GBC Northern Regional Correspondent Murtala examines the initiative in this report.
It is a farmer’s field day at Kpana, a farming community 17 kilometres west of the Northern Regional Capital, Tamale. Sulemana Baba, a smallholder farmer, listens attentively as a crop scientist delivers a lecture on climate-smart innovation.
Baba is among some three hundred farmers gathered on the field today. Though it is drizzling, Baba and his colleagues look on attentively, like students in an interesting laboratory experiment. “We have to learn these new techniques for survival,” he explained later.
Baba and his colleague smallholder farmers in the Northern Region of Ghana have suffered the devastating impact of climate change on food production; as a result, many have become food insecure. “Last year, I harvested only three bags of maize from a one-acre farm,” he revealed.
The average yield per acre, according to experts, is twelve bags. But for people like Baba, who rely on rainfall to cultivate their farms, life has become quite challenging.
The low yields being recorded by farmers have coincided with a rise in staple food prices like cowpea, rice, and maize. “In 2021, we sold a bowl of cowpea for GH₵ 8. Last year (2022), a bowl was sold for between GH₵ 15 and GH₵ 17. This year, a bowl is going for GH₵ 35,” revealed Zeenah Abdul Aziz, a cereal retailer at Kpassa, one of Ghana’s biggest agricultural commodity markets.
According to the Ghana Statistical Service, inflation stood at 13.9 percent in January 2022, and by December the same year, inflation, driven by a surge in food prices, rose to 54.1 percent. As at July 2023, the year-on-year rate for food inflation stood at 55 percent.
The World Bank, in its 7th economic update on Ghana, revealed that high inflation pushed eight hundred and fifty thousand Ghanaians into poverty, while eight hundred and twenty-three thousand were made food insecure in 2022.
The rise in prices has impacted many smallholder farmers who are forced to buy food due to poor yields caused by climate change.
Experts at the Crop Research Institute of the Center for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) have developed drought-resistant cowpea and maize varieties to enable farmers to mitigate the impact of climate change and ultimately boost food security.
The farmers day field visits and training are part of the Accelerating Impacts of CGIAR Climate Research for Africa (AICCRA) project funded by the International Development Association (IDA) of the Borld Bank.
The AICCRA project is implemented by the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture with the support of the Crop Research Institute, the Ghana Meteorological Agency, University for Development Studies (UDS), Esoko, and Center for Agriculture and Bioscience International.
Under the initiative, farmers are introduced to stress-tolerant crop varieties, while information on the climate is regularly shared to keep farmers updated on when to plough and plant their seeds for optimum yields.
The Technical Focal Person on the AICCRA Project, Dr. Stephen Yebaoh, disclosed that the initiative is being implemented in 22 communities across six regions of Ghana.
“We are promoting cowpea as a way of strengthening the resilience of smallholder farmers, especially women, to achieve household food security,” he said.
The project also seeks to minimise the use of synthetic agrochemicals, which according to Dr. Yeboah, reduce soil fertility in the long term and affect crops, livestock, and human life.
“We train farmers on how to produce products from Nim leaves (Azadirachta indica) to apply to the soil to curb a lot of disease conditions, such as nematodes,” he explained.
A smallholder farmer, Sharatu Yakubu, who was impressed by the performance of the crops on the demonstration field, indicated that she would go for the new seeds to plant in the next season.
“Compared to our own seeds, you can see that these crops look healthier. The rains stopped at a point; most of our crops suffered as a result, but these ones have survived and are giving good results,” she observed.
Stakeholders are hopeful that the AICCRA project will help smallholder farmers overcome the challenges of climate change and boost household food security.