Africa-Press – Ghana. Changing Lives in Innovative Partnerships (CLIP), an NGO, has engaged the Minister for Food and Agriculture as part of its advocacy efforts on issues of climate change and sustainable livelihoods for smallholder farmers and communities.
Discussions centred on CLIP’s interventions over the years, its current focus on building resilience of smallholder farmers for food security and climate change, the Ministry’s interventions to boost food production and how CLIP and the Ministry could work together for the benefit of smallholder farmers.
The engagement was in line with CLIP’s implementation of the climate change component of the Empowerment for Life (E4L) Programme, which seeks to ensure that climate vulnerable communities use climate resilience strategies and technologies to increase agricultural adaptability and improved livelihoods.
Mr Lukman Yussif, Director of CLIP, who led a team from the organisation to pay a courtesy call on the Minister in Accra, emphasised the need for strong collaboration and engagement between government and NGOs in policy formulation to ensure that policies and programmes reflected the interest of the people.
CLIP, which is based in Tamale, has been working for the past 30 years in empowering vulnerable communities through integrated programmes that ensure climate resilience, sustainable livelihoods and community development.
CLIP, as part of the E4L Programme, has formed Coalition of Farmer Associations in the Northern, North East and Savannah Regions as part of efforts to build resilience of smallholder farmers for food security and climate change.
Mr Yussif touched on CLIP’s work in the area of agropastoralism, an initiative under which farmers and herders are brought together to ensure peaceful coexistence, and sought the Minister’s support for the work of the Cattle Ranching Committee.
He touched on the challenges smallholder farmers faced in transporting farm produce to market centres and appealed to the Minister to work towards addressing them.
He congratulated the Minister on his appointment to the Ministry and commended him for his readiness to listen to the concerns of sector players to address them.
Mr Abdallah Mohammed, Technical Advisor, Food Security, Climate Change and Resilience, E4L Programme, CLIP, said agriculture was one of the main focus areas of CLIP and expressed need for the Ministry and the Coalition of Farmer Associations to work closely to boost food production.
He expressed concern about the failure to capture agriculture as part of the Guidelines for the utilization of the District Assemblies Common Fund (DACF) for this year and further appealed to the Minister to reconsider the Guidelines, especially as agriculture featured prominently in the work of the district assemblies.
Mr Eric Opoku, Minister for Food and Agriculture, said agriculture was the pivot of the policies that the government was rolling out, adding the government was committed to implementing its agriculture for economic transformation agenda to transform the economy.
He said the Ministry was working with community commodity-focused cooperatives to benefit from specific government interventions and expressed need for farmer groups, including the Coalition of Farmers Associations to be community commodity-focused to facilitate their registration as cooperatives for government to tailor specific support toward them.
He said the Ministry was working with the Ministry of Finance to capture agriculture as part of the Guidelines for the utilization of the DACF for this year.
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