Assessing the Impact of Financial Support on Ghana’s Agricultural Development

Agriculture is a type of economic activity, livelihood, and provider of environmental services, contributing to the development process. It can participate, in concert with other sectors, in realizing faster growth, poverty reduction, and environmental sustainability. Agriculture has a special ability to reduce poverty. The objectives of the study are to identify agricultural development in Ghana and identify challenges of modern agricultural development in Ghana. Data from the field were collected from the primary and secondary sources. Depending on the resources available to the researcher, all the beneficiary farmers were interviewed to understand the situation on the ground to improve credit delivery and agriculture development in Ghana. It was identified that the several Rural Banks disburses the entire loan earmark for particular year to the farmers. However, the banks satisfy only 83.3 percent and 63.4 percent of the applicants in 2015 and 2016 financial years respectively. According to the project officers of the various rural banks, the reduction is due to low rate of recovery (i.e. 3.45) for the 2015 financial year. However, the farmers’ complaint of late receipts of the loan and lack of storage facilities compelled them to sell the produce at uneconomic prices which led to low income, low investment and low savings. In 2019, it was recommended that the rural banks should take into account the advantages of providing credit in kind for purchased inputs. This would relieve the smallholder farmers of further transactions with which he may be unfamiliar and provide the bank with some assurances that the credit is used for the purposes intended. This credit must be timely as it will prevent the farmers from diversion and loss. Subjecting the problem to critical analysis, it is recommended that the economy and lifestyle of Ghana are dependent on agriculture. It is the major employer of her population and contributes massively to her foreign exchange, supplier of food and raw materials for the population and industries, provider of import substitution to solve the balance of payment situations in the country. However, the performance of this sector is inhibited by finance even though there is institutional source of credit from the commercial and development banks; they are not readily made available to the small-scale farmers who produce the bulk of the country’s food requirements.