Bilateral meeting with The Honourable Eric Opoku, Minister for Food and Agriculture of the Republic of Ghana

Rome – The FAO Director-General, QU Dongyu, met with The Honourable Eric Opoku, Minister for Food and Agriculture of the Republic of Ghana, on the margins of the 44th Session of the FAO Ministerial Conference at FAO Headquarters.

The Director-General welcomed the Minister and congratulated him on his recent appointment, and acknowledged and appreciated the longstanding and strategic relationship and strong cooperation between FAO and the Republic of Ghana. He especially thanked the government of Ghana and its people for hosting the FAO Regional Office for Africa and reaffirmed FAO’s commitment to enhance its effectiveness by bringing its expertise and resources closer to the countries and communities that it serves. The Director General informed that strengthening the Regional Office would make it more efficient, productive, and responsive to the needs of FAO Representations across the Africa Region. 

The Director-General reaffirmed his commitment and that of the FAO to continue to support Ghana to strengthen its agricultural sector to strategically align the upcoming Country Programming Framework (CPF) with the national priorities, with particular focus on food security, climate resilience and soil fertility management. He encouraged Ghana to consider increasing value addition of its raw products citing production chocolates because of the country’s high-quality cocoa.

The Minister thanked the Director-General and highlighted that Ghana had huge food insecurity challenges this year due to decreased agricultural production caused by drought in 2024. The Minister stated that they required technical assistance for irrigation and water management and preservation and establishment of boreholes. The Director General suggested that the possibility could be explored to establish a TCP project through the Green Climate Fund (GCF) to explore the potential of harnessing water through irrigation projects.

The Minister agreed with the Director General that there is a need to increase value addition for most of Ghana’s raw products citing cocoa, cashew nuts, cotton and shea butter, and requested FAO’s support for value addition and increased income from these products for smallholder farmers. He further informed that the government was paying attention to neglected indigenous crops (NUS) and sought to explore through research if these could be improved as they had great potential to contribute to food security and nutrition.

In this regard, the Director-General suggested that a research platform could be established through the South-South Cooperation programme to include a soil mapping project for the production of products like cassava, millet and fonio.