The Director of Research at the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA), Prof. Alexander Bilson Darku, has called for Ghana to place agriculture at the centre of its economic transformation to create more jobs for the country’s growing youth population.
He said an economy such as Ghana’s, where a significant proportion of the employed population is engaged in agriculture, would benefit more if the sector became a key driver of economic growth.
Speaking in an interview with Jude Duncan on Channel One TV’s The Point of View on Wednesday, September 2, Prof. Darku said Ghana had moved too quickly towards a service-led economy despite its significant untapped agricultural potential.
“An economy like ours, where a larger percentage of people employed are in agriculture, it would be more assuring if agriculture is driving the economy, because then it will be able to absorb more of the youth unemployed that we have here,” he said.
He said although a transition to a service-led economy was desirable in the long term, Ghana had “gone too fast ahead of the curve” given its level of development.
“We are still well underdeveloped, and we still have a lot of potential in the agriculture sector that we should have been taking advantage of some decades ago that we didn’t,” he said.
Prof. Darku said agriculture should be positioned as the driver of Ghana’s economic transformation while also providing the raw materials needed to support industrial growth.
“Going forward, I think it’s only fair and the right trajectory for us to focus more on agriculture, to make agriculture take its place in the economy as the driver of transformation and be able to also feed the industrial growth that we so desire to have,” he said.
He argued that sectors with the greatest potential to create jobs should drive economic growth, particularly as Ghana grapples with youth unemployment.
“You want the sector or the economy that has the highest impact on generating employment to drive growth over time. That would then be the growth that addresses unemployment too,” he said.
Prof. Darku added that agriculture and agribusiness could provide more opportunities for unemployed young people.
“To me as an economist, I see that there are a lot of unemployed youth who can have opportunities in the agriculture sector, agribusiness, for them to get themselves out of an unemployment situation,” he said.
