Perfume rice production by five farmer based organisations in the Hohoe District of the Volta Region

Abstract

The above project is an initiative of the Ghana Rice Inter-professional Body (GRIB) with support from the Food Security and Rice Producers Organization Project (FSRPOP). The effort is to facilitate the production and marketing of locally produced rice to gradually substitute for rice imports into Ghana. Five Farmer Based Organizations mostly made up of resources-poor local farmers who have been engaged in rice production for over a decade in the Hohoe District of the Volta Region of Ghana were selected to carry out this intervention. The Food Research Institute (FR!) of the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research was contracted to supervise and formulate control measures to ensure the quality of the produce while the Ministry of Food and Agriculture (MOFA) played a dual role as technical adviser and facilitator between the farmers and the two organizations. During the initial phase of the project, an FRI team undertook field visits to interact with participating farmer groups and individual farmers with the aim of establishing the input supply system of production and develop with the farmers, an estimated and realistic crop budget. Farmer groups interacted with included those based in Likpe-Bakwa, Lolobi-Kurnasi, Akpafu-Odorni and Fodome-Helu. Land tenure systems, cultural practices/agronomic practices and labour requirement, farmers' constraints among others which pertain to the localities were taken note of A credit facility of one million cedis per farmer to enable them finance their operations was arranged with the Weto Rural Bank at Kpeve. However, the bank pulled out the last hour, necessitating FRI and MoFA to make an ad hoc arrangement to save the situation by providing very essential inputs such as seed and agro-chernicals on credit to the farmers while farmers did land preparation at their own cost. Farmers were equipped with the requisite knowledge to produce good quality paddy rice that would sell for good price through a training workshop. One professional miller (Kakpor) and three milling assistants each from three mill houses (Odomi, Akpafu and Hohoe) were trained in rice milling and basic record keeping. The weather in general was not very favourable. Though there were sporadic heavy falis, long periods of drought in between resulted in poor development of the crop in all the communities and adversely affected yields. So bad was the yield that farmers have made alternate arrangements to payoff loans that were taken. The two major set backs the project has suffered have been the failure of the Weto Rural bank to provide the much needed credit to the farmers and the unfavourable weather condition. These unfortunate circumstances defeated the whole purpose of getting reliable data from farmers to accurately determine the realistic crop budget for the perfume rice production