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AGRICULTURAL SECTOR

 Introduction


Agriculture plays a central role in promoting growth and poverty reduction in Ghana. Ghana therefore needs an agricultural revolution based on sustained growth in order to raise Ghanaians from poverty and improve livelihoods significantly. This chapter presents analysis of data on agricultural activities in the Bawku West District, with the main focus on households in agriculture and types of farming activities.


Households in Agriculture

Households in agriculture refer to households with at least one member engaged in one agricultural activity or another. Table 7.1 presents information on the total number of households engaged in agricultural activities such as crop farming, tree planting, livestock rearing and fish farming. The table indicates that, there are 15,169 households in the district with 14,159 of them in agriculture. Thus, majority of the households (93.3%) are engaged in agricultural activities, only 6.7 are not engaged in any form of agricultural activity.

Table 7.1 indicates, there are more households in agricultural activities in the rural areas (96.5%) than the urban areas (68.4%).


7.3 Type of Farming Activities


Table 7.1 reports on the distribution of the different agricultural activities. The data show that some households undertake more than one activity. Thus the 14,159 households in agriculture are engaged in 26,132 agricultural activities giving an average of 1.8 activities per household.

Like other districts in the region, the majority (93.3%) of people in the district are engaged in agriculture. The district has substantial agricultural resources, which includes large expands of land suitable for agriculture and the Volta Lake which has high potential for fish farming. Table 7.1 shows that, 98.1 percent of agricultural households are engaged in crop farming compared to 86 .1 percent engaged in livestock rearing (. There are few households in the district engaged in tree planting (0.3%) and fish farming (0.1%).

Figure 7.1 shows that the number of households in crop farming, tree growing and livestock rearing is higher in the rural areas than the urban areas. Crop farming remains the largest 49

 

(agriculture activity for both urban and rural areas of the districts). This is closely followed by livestock rearing, which is the second highest agricultural activity for both urban and rural areas. However, the number of households in fish farming in the urban areas is larger than the households in rural ones.

 Distribution of livestock rearing


Livestock rearing is the second most important agricultural activity in the district, (both in the rural and urban areas). Table 7.2 reveals that, a total number of 455,687 pieces of livestock are reared in the district.

There are 33,682 livestock keepers with an average of 13.5 animals per keeper. In the district, chicken are mostly reared (30.9%) and accounts for 23.2 of animal keepers, with an average 18.1 chickens per keeper, followed by guinea fowl (30.5%) which accounts for 20.1 percent of keepers and an average of 20.5 birds per keeper.

Although livestock rearing is the second engaged agricultural activity, cattle form only 8.6 percent of the animals and accounts for 10.6 percent of keepers. Snail, are the least reared in the district. Goat rearing constitutes 17.3 percent of animal rearing and 26.6 percent of keepers.

 


Date Created : 11/18/2017 4:44:15 AM