Banks urged to support commercial farming, Wednesday, October 20, 2010, pg 55

  MD of the Prairie Volta Limited, Everette Anderson, explaining a point  about rice cultivation  to students of the Faculty of Engineering of the University of Ghana when they visited the Aveyime Rice Farm.

Everette Anderson explaining a point about a tractor's operation to the students while Mr Vandyke-Mensah(in cap  with arms folded) looks on.


Everette Anderson, explaining the farm's irrigation system with Mr Vandyke-Mensah (in cap with hands on the waist) looking on.


 A Managing Partner of the Prairie Volta Limited, a local rice production company at Aveyime in the Volta Region, has appealed to commercial banks in Ghana to lend support to commercial farming in the country in order to push Ghana’s quest for a sustained food security.

Mr John VanDyke-Mensah said with the exception of the Agriculture Development Bank which is living to its mandate of supporting agriculture development in the country, most of the commercial banks are not in tune with supporting commercial farming.

According to him, the local rice industry is not able to satisfy the demand for rice because “a lot of the government interventions go to small scale farmers. We (commercial farmers) are left on our own to source for our funds and also pay market rates.”

He said for the rice industry to be attractive to investors, there was the need for the government to create the environment where access to finance is made easy and at cheaper rates in addition to direct interventions such as bearing the cost of land clearing.

Mr VanDyke-Mensah made the remark in an interview with the Daily Graphic when 40 students from the Faculty of Engineering of the University of Ghana led by the Dean of the Faculty, Prof S. Sefa-Dedeh, toured the various sites of the company’s operations.

The trip which forms part of the faculty’s institution-partnership initiative was to help the students synchronise the theory side of their course with the practical and help deepen their knowledge of what is taught in school.

Mr VanDyke-Mensah said the company will collaborate with the faculty to ensure that the students were exposed to modern technologically driven system of farming.

“We want to promote institutional partnership as done in the other part of the world to ensure that our young people are well exposed to modern systems of farming that will help drive our economy,” he stated.

The Managing Director of the company, Mr Everett Anderson, said the company is currently testing 75 cultivars of rice across the globe to find the most suitable for the Ghanaian terrain in order to increase its quantum of locally produced rice.

“Just because a particular cultivar grows well in Thailand, the US or Brazil does not mean it will necessarily grow well in Ghana because different factors affect it.”

He said the target of the company was to produce six tons of rice per hectare but production is now at four hence the cultivars test to improve yield.

He stated that to expand the operations of the farm and reduce the cost of production, which is currently high because of the topography of the land, the company has acquired an extra 2,000 hectares.

Mr Anderson said the future of the rice industry in Ghana is bright adding “there is no reason rice cannot grow well in Ghana, all the natural resources are available in addition, the price of rice is high enough to support the industry.”

The Dean of the Agriculure Engineering Faculty, Prof Sefa-Dedeh, for his part said the field trip was crucial as the university could not afford to have the facilities available at the Prairie Volta Limited.

“The best step is to get the students into productive sectors of the economy where they can observe for themselves both production and processing side of agribusiness, and Prairie Volta Limited is just the perfect example.”

He stated that the training of engineers demands that the students get practical hand-on experience which would help them to identify the opportunities available to them and some of the challenges in the field.

Agyekum Prempeh Ofori, a final year Agriculture Engineering student, told the Daily Graphic that the trip was very informative as it made it possible to create a correlation between the theories in class and practical issues on the ground and “It has really made us appreciate what we study.”