A former General Secretary of the General Agricultural Workers’ Union (GAWU), Edward Kareweh, says Ghana must stop celebrating “policy intentions” and begin holding policymakers accountable for real outcomes in the agriculture sector.
Speaking on the AM Show as the country marked the 2025 Farmers’ Day, Mr Kareweh argued that governments have repeatedly unveiled attractive agricultural policies that fail to deliver meaningful results for farmers.
According to him, policy announcements should not be glorified when they consistently fall short in practice.
“For some of us, policy intentions are nothing. It’s like a promise — and promises can fail,” he said. “We must hold people accountable for outcomes… Why is it that we have not had the outcomes we expected from the policy?”
He noted that, despite years of well-crafted agricultural reforms, Ghana continues to struggle with the same structural challenges that confront farmers, including access to inputs, credit, extension services, and guaranteed markets.
Mr Kareweh criticised what he described as a recurring cycle in which governments are praised for new policy ideas, even when previous ones have not achieved their intended impact.
“We are stuck with this notion that because a policy is nice, we celebrate it,” he said. “We have had very good policies in the past, but we have not gotten to where we should be.”
He stressed that the country appears not to be learning from past mistakes in agricultural governance, a gap he believes continues to undermine progress.
“All the things we are talking about today for farmers, we have said them for years — yet we are simply not doing them,” he added.
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