[ 2016-06-29 ]

Dr Charles Abugre — SADA Boss

SADA cuts directs loans to farmers
The Management of the Savannah Accelerated
Development Authority (SADA) will no longer
directly grant loans to individual farmers in its
operational zone, the Chief Executive Officer
(CEO) of the authority, Dr. Charles Abugre, has
said.

Instead, Dr. Abugre said the authority would
sponsor financial institutions to provide
financial assistance for farmers who were
interested in using the zone’s vast arable lands
to produce food for the local and international
market.

The new measure is to help insulate SADA from
heavy loan defaults, which it has suffered since
in 2013.

In that year, poor harvest, resulting from bad
weather, made it impossible for farmers to repay
some GHCC21.8 million given to them by the
authority.

Of the amount, only about GHC998,000,
representing four per cent, was repaid.

Consequently, SADA wrote off the amount as bad
debt, something the Auditor General flagged in its
2014 report.

Applying lessons

Dr. Abugri, who revealed this to the Graphic
Business at a workshop in Accra, indicated that
the authority remained committed to developing the
zone into a modern industrial hub.

“SADA will no longer give loans to farmers
directly anymore; that is why we are trying to
sponsor independent private-sector-driven
financial institutions to solve the problem of
financing agriculture. This decision emanates from
the two years’ experiment we have had from
providing assistance to farmers directly,” he
said.

He explained that farmers who were provided with
loans in 2013 were unable to repay them because
most of them suffered poor harvest in the period
under review.

Workshop

Meanwhile, a three-day technical workshop on
agricultural investment in the savannah zone has
been held in Accra.

The workshop was organised on the theme:
“Accelerated Transformation of the Northern
Savannah Ecological Zone through Agriculture.”
It brought together policy makers and stakeholders
to develop a strategy that will serve as a guide
to accelerate developmental growth within the SADA
zone.

The Minister of Finance, Mr. Seth Terkper, in his
keynote address, said the zone was the economic
reservoir in the country, but it had remained
unexploited over the years.

The SADA zone has immense agricultural resources,
with about eight million hectors of arable
agricultural land that could trigger the economic
transformation of Ghana and the sub-Saharan
Africa.

According to him, the zone is fertile enough to
produce abundant grain to feed the entire country
and export to the rest of the sub-region.

“The zone has the potential to produce all the
tomatoes needed in Ghana, and both the rice and
tomatoes that would meet the country’s needs
represents over US$400 million of annual savings
to our foreign exchange reserves,” he said.

He said throughout the world, the savannah
represented immense agricultural potential, the
Brazilian Cerrados, and other Asian savannah areas
testify this potential at the zone.

“We, therefore, need to take a critical look at
the northern savannah ecological zone in order to
realise similar benefits as a country,” the
minister noted.

Government’s commitment

He said the government was deeply concerned about
the way the SADA zone lagged behind the rest of
the country on key areas of social-economic
development, while the potential remained
untapped.

“The government has been concerned with
improving the life of every Ghanaian, spreading
the growth in the south to other parts of the
country and ensuring equity in the distribution of
resources,” he said.

According to him, it is for this reason that the
situation in the northern savannah zone deserves
special continuous focus from government’s
economic policies.

The government remains committed to supporting
the development of the savannah zone within the
context of the broader national policy and
development goals.

SADA was set up in 2010 as an independent agency
for coordinating a development agenda for the
northern savannah ecological zone of Ghana, which
consists of Upper East, Upper West, and the
Northern Region, north of Brong-Ahafo, and north
of the Volta Region.

Source - Daily Graphic

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