Former General Secretary of the General Agricultural Workers Union (GAWU), Edward Kareweh says the alignment of Agribusiness with the Ministry of Trade and Industry instead of the Food and Agriculture Ministry is a step in the right direction.
President Mahama, through a Civil Service Instrument, has realigned ministries his government will work with. With some ministries scrapped and others merged, the number from the previous administration has been brought down to 23 from 30.
One realignment which has become the talk of town is the alignment of Agribusiness to the Ministry of Trade and Industry instead of the Ministry of Food and Agriculture. Many sector players are expressing the view that Agribusiness should have been put under the care of the Ministry of Agriculture for proper agribusiness alignment.
But Edward Kareweh maintains that aligning Agribusiness with the Trade and Industry Ministry is laudable and will serve the interest of the sector better. This new Agribusiness alignment is seen as beneficial for all parties involved.
In an interview with The High Street Journal, the former general secretary of GAWU addressed the impression that the government is rather taking Agribusiness from the Ministry of Agric. He argues that Agribusiness wasn’t even part of the core functionality of the Ministry of Agric under the previous administration.
“The agribusiness part of it that we are talking about was not actually aligned to the Ministry of Agriculture,” he indicated.
The new Agribusiness alignment, he says, is an indication of the priority the new government has for this sector.
Commenting on the appropriateness of adding Agribusiness to the Ministry of Trade and Industry, he explained that agribusiness itself falls within the Small & Medium Enterprises (SMEs) category. The Trade and Industry Ministry, he says, already has established structures and units that help to develop SMEs hence the step is in the right direction.
“If you look at the Ministry of Trade and Industry, it already has SMEs and then business development units. Now, if you talk about agribusiness alignment, it will eventually fall under SMEs. So, in my view, why do you create another unit under the Ministry of Agriculture, which will be dealing with SMEs, instead of the Ministry of Trade and Industry, which already has SMEs and then business development units?” he quizzed.
He further argued that the Ministry of Food and Agriculture, over the years, has not shown enough track record to prove that it can handle the agribusiness aspect of the agricultural value chain. Edward Kareweh says there are bottlenecks in the operations of the Agric Ministry in addition to the lack of capacity to manage such an important part of the value chain.
In his view, the Ministry of Agric has not been able to deliver on its core mandate of food production. Initiatives such as Planting for Food and Jobs among others were not well managed by the ministry. With such a track record, it will be unwise for the government to add agribusiness to its core duties when there is a better-resourced ministry that offers a clearer agribusiness alignment.
“It’s also disappointing to see that if you look at the Ministry of Agriculture, for all these years, in spite of their technical skills and the rest of the personnel and so on, and the units, they have not been able to deliver on producing enough food for this country. In fact, the ministry has become a source of waste, to the extent that billions of Ghana cedis are spent, and yet we have nothing to show for it,” he noted.
He is convinced that “it will be too much of a gamble at this stage where we need results urgently to put this agribusiness development under the Ministry of Agriculture. It will not be wise when you are in a hurry to feed the people and to get improvement and create jobs, you take the agribusiness development into agriculture again. After all, they tried to create jobs. They failed. They tried to produce food. They failed.”
He rather recommends that to achieve sustainable results, there should be proper agribusiness alignment linkages between the two ministries. This, he believes, will help to achieve the government’s vision for agribusiness alignment and development.
