We Have Been Neglected! — Poultry Farmers Cry For Help

Poultry farmers in the country have registered their displeasure about what they describe as government’s lukewarm attitude towards the industry.

According to them the Ministry of Food and Agriculture (MoFA) has, for many years now, side-lined the industry, leaving farmers to their fate.

Addressing a press conference in Kumasi recently, John Bewuah Edusei, spokesperson of the Ghana Poultry Farmers Association (GPFA), said the industry was not looking good as businesses continued to struggle.

He therefore called on government to take urgent steps to revamp and give a new lease of life to the nation’s collapsing poultry industry.

He complained about the lack of recognition, lamenting that not a single poultry farmer was honoured with an award at last year’s Farmers’ Day Celebration.

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, saying “The investment we made, just went down the drain”.

According to him, Ghana’s poultry industry, if given the necessary support to operate more efficiently, could create a lot of jobs and wealth for the people.

The spokesperson noted that for every one million broilers produced locally, close to about 100,000 jobs could be created along the production value chain.

He called for a closer examination of the ‘Broiler Project’, which was introduced in 2014, to get things streamlined. This, he argued, could aid farmers to acquire processing plants, regulate chicken importation and provide ready market for their products.

The goal of the project is to assist the farmers to go into large scale production of broilers to meet local demand; and thereby cut down chicken importation by about 40 per cent.

Ghana has averagely been importing about 250,000 metric tons of chicken and five million day-old chicks annually.

Source: thePublisher