ASSISTING FARMERS TO ACCESS WATER TO INCREASE THEIR PTODUCTIVTY

The performance of the agricultural sector has serious implications not only for most of the
rural inhabitants, since fanning in Ghana is largely a rural phenomenon, but also for the agro-
industrial sector growth. The role of the agricultural sector is crucial for the attainment of the
goals set in Ghana’s Vision 2020. The sector is expected to ensure food security and adequate
nutrition for all Ghanaians, to supply raw materials and other inputs to other sectors of the
economy as well as to provide producers with farm income comparable to earnings outside
agriculture. Water is vital for all socio-economic development and for maintaining healthy
ecosystems. Agriculture is accountable for the largest extraction of water and thus considered
the chief ‘culprit’ under conditions of local absolute scarceness. Water is a key element of
agricultural production.

Agriculture is highly constrained by rainfall unreliability, frequent dry spells, irrigation water
scarcity and conflicts over water. This threatens food availability in some countries especially
Ghana and tends to increase food aid dependency. Global efforts towards reducing food aid
dependency include financing irrigation development to enhance rain fed yields by use of
supplementary irrigation. However, it has recently been found that increasing productivity of
water through water conservation is a more appealing option than developing new irrigation
facilities. The concept of productivity of water is not well-understood and the practice of
assessing productivity is insufficient. In most irrigation systems there are hardly any efforts to
mainstream the assessment of productivity with respect to water, as yet.

Today, farmers, advisors and policy makers are faced with complex choices with regards to
access water. They are faced with a wide range of technologies that are either available or
under development; they must deal with the uncertainties of both the effects these new
technologies will have throughout the agro-food chain and the impact that a whole range of
policies will have on the sustainability of farming systems with production of water. In
addition, there is increasing pressure on agricultural research and advisory budgets that must
be accommodated.

Irrigation has helped enhance agricultural yields and outputs in arid and semi-arid
environments and stabilized food production and cost.

Irrigated agriculture plays a major role in food security, producing nearly 40 percent (%) of
food and agricultural commodities. It uses more than 80% of the water withdrawn from the
earth’s rivers. This increased pressure to water as a valuable resource in agricultural food
production which remains finite due to the competition of current and future events namely;
rapid increase in world population, climatic change, agricultural and industrial sector
activities. In order to conserve and able to produce food continuously; an efficient water use
and crop yield improving agricultural practices need to be adapted and implemented.
Solutions to the challenge of water availability can be explored at three levels. It can be
tackled by increasing the upstream storage capacity; by improving the efficiency of the
transportation and distribution infrastructure; and by better allocating water to end users.

It is, therefore, important to consider the following; the extent agricultural practices can be
manipulated and to what extent cropland water requirements can be minimized at high output
through better management practices in order to meet the existing crop production demand,
and continuously food production to feed both current and future growing world population
without damaging the environment. To mitigate these effects, agricultural practices that make
use of water efficiently and yield improving irrigation strategies should be adopted, whereby
irrigation is rated as the major solution.

By Dickson Fosu

Ghana