By Anthony Adongo Apubeo
Bolgatanga, Oct 25, GNA – The Peasant Farmers Association of Ghana (PFAG) has trained aggregators as part of efforts to reposition its members to attract investment and take advantage of opportunities to expand their businesses and operations.
The training with funding support from Oxfam in Ghana became necessary because of the requirements for the selection of aggregators to benefit the second phase of the Planting for Food and Jobs (PFJ 2.0).
The PFJ 2.0 which focused on creating market opportunities for farmers, focused on benefiting aggregators, however, it required the aggregators to formalise their businesses, honour tax returns among others to qualify for the package.
The situation therefore made it difficult for most of the aggregators of the PFGA to qualify and the training was therefore to empower the aggregators to see agriculture and its value chain as business and reposition themselves to benefit from future opportunities.
Aggregators are individuals or cooperatives that collect or buy farm products from the farmers at the farm gates and resell them at the larger market and this helps to set the standards for what the export market demands, the time for when the product should be ready and is responsible for tackling the bureaucracy in export.
Under the PFJ 2.0, the aggregators are also responsible for providing input services such as improved seeds, mechanisation services and extension services among others to the farmers and the farmers pay back in cash or kind after production.
The aggregators further purchase the surplus products to be resold for designated markets or stored in warehouses for future sales.
Mr Bismark Owusu Nortey, the Acting Executive Director, PFAG, speaking to the Ghana News Agency on the side-lines of the training indicated that through assessment, it was discovered that many of their aggregators were not qualified to benefit from the PFJ 2.0 due to the criteria set out for the selection.
“For a person to qualify as an aggregator under the PFJ 2.0, there are some specific requirement that he or she must have, that is, about registration of your businesses, doing your tax returns and a whole lot of things that they are supposed to do and so when we did an assessment of our aggregators, we realised that a lot of them were not up to speed”, he said.
Mr Nortey explained that the aim of PFAG was to build the capacities of its members to reposition them properly to take advantage of any intervention to increase their productivity and incomes and reduce poverty among smallholder farmers.
He said the training which was in partnership with the Ghana Enterprise Agency was to expose the aggregators to more formalised ways of doing business that would attract investors and opportunities and help them benefit appropriately from government’s interventions.
He explained that agriculture was a business which needed strategic investment and called on the government to complement the work of PFAG to ensure that smallholder farmers had the capacity to benefit from any future interventions and policy decision making.
Madam Stella Chibelitu Kada, an aggregator and participant of the training expressed gratitude to PFAG for the training, indicating that it had exposed them to critical issues that would boost their agribusinesses.
She, however, expressed worry about the implementation of the PFJ 2.0 which made it difficult for aggregators to benefit from the programme and called on government to support activities of smallholder farmers.
Alhaji Abdul-Rahman Mohammed, another aggregator explained that there was delay in the release of farm inputs to farmers which affected smallholder farmers’ access to PFJ 2.0 package and called for review of the intervention in subsequent implementation.
GNA