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Ghana has been advised to adopt Climate-Smart Agriculture (CSA) approach to increase agriculture production, ensure food security, and build climate resilience.

The African continent has also been encouraged to diversify the sector to ensure food sufficiency.

A latest report released by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) on climate science indicates that there are some major transformative steps needed to be taken to address the vulnerability climate change poses to the agricultural sector.

According to the report by the IPCC’s Working Group II on climate change impacts, adaptation and vulnerability, agriculture production on the continent slowed by 34 percent. 

Commenting on the Findings, Dr Shaibu Baanni Azumah, an Agriculture Economist, told the Ghana News Agency that climate change impacts, which had been aggravated by the COVID-19 pandemic, were real in Ghana and the whole of Africa and had dire implications on food systems and the economies too.

African leaders, he noted, had not prioritized measures to ameliorate the impact of climate vulnerability.

“We are not food secured because we are not self-sufficient in the production and consumption of maize and rice for instance, which are very important food commodities for most countries.

Climate change impacts is also having a toll and playing a major role in it,” he said.

“As we speak in Ghana, we have a deficit of more than 50 percent in terms of rice production alone. What that means is that, in terms of our consumption pattern, we can only take care of about 40 percent.

About 60 percent of the population will not have it. So, we must either import or we try to find ways by which we can produce to make up for this deficit.” 

He said although CSA  had been captured under Ghana’s updated Nationally Determined Contribution, it was yet to be implemented under its flagship project -Planting for Food and Jobs.

Dr Azumah proposed to the government to invest in the production and distribution of improved seeds, intensification and scientific approaches where nature-based solutions, such as the use of agriculture byproducts, often discarded, to be used to produce organic compost to improve soil fertility.

“For instance, global prices of chemical fertilizer have increased between 2020 and now, and because of the surge of COVID-19, our ability to integrate organic fertilizer will reduce the cost and strengthen our fragile soils, especially in the northern part of Ghana,” he said.