Kumasi, Jan 08, - The government
has been asked to take urgent steps to revamp and give a new lease of life to
the nation’s collapsing poultry industry.
Mr. John Bewuah Edusei,
Spokesperson of the Ghana Poultry Farmers Association, said it was not looking
good as their businesses continued to struggle.
Addressing a press conference in
Kumasi, he indicated that, if supported to operate more efficiently, the
industry was one area that could create jobs and wealth for the people.
He appealed for closer
examination of the ‘Broiler Project’, introduced in year 2014, to get things
streamlined - to aid the farmers to acquire processing plants, regulate chicken
importation and provide ready market for their products.
The goal of the project is to cut
chicken importation by 40 per cent by assisting the farmers to go into large
scale production of broilers to meet the local demand.
Mr. Edusei said about 70 per cent
of the farmers who had produced birds for the last Christmas festivities had
all gone bankrupt due to poor sales.
He added that “the investment we
made, just went down the drain”.
He complained about what he said
was the industry’s lack of recognition, saying, it was the only sector under
the Ministry of Food and Agriculture (MoFA), which had been sidelined.
He maintained that not a single
poultry farmer was recognized with an award at last year’s Farmers’ Day
Celebration.
Ghana has averagely been
importing about 250,000 metric tons of chicken and five million day-old chicks
annually.
He said the nation could learn
from neighboring countries like Cote d’Ivoire, Burkina Faso and Nigeria, where
chicken importation had been banned to save the local industry.
He noted that for every one
million broilers produced locally, close to about 100, 000 jobs could be
created along the production value chain.
GNA
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