As Ghana celebrated the 2025 Farmers’ Day, former General Secretary of the General Agricultural Workers’ Union (GAWU), Edward Kareweh, delivered a blunt message: the country must stop applauding appealing agricultural policy announcements and start demanding real, measurable outcomes.
Speaking on the AM Show, Mr Kareweh argued that Ghana has spent years praising well-packaged policy intentions that repeatedly fail to transform the lives of farmers. He said governments continue to unveil impressive strategies, but farmers still battle the same structural problems that have persisted for decades.
“For some of us, policy intentions are nothing. It’s like a promise — and promises can fail,” he stated. “We must hold people accountable for outcomes. Why have we not achieved the results these policies promised?”
Kareweh pointed out that despite a long list of agricultural reforms, farmers continue to struggle with inadequate access to inputs, financing, extension officers, and guaranteed markets. These gaps, he said, reflect a system where policymakers are celebrated for what they plan to do rather than what they actually deliver.
He criticised what he described as a national habit of glorifying policies simply because they sound good, even when previous ones have not produced the intended change.
“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.”
According to him, Ghana continues to repeat the same mistakes in agricultural governance, failing to apply lessons from earlier initiatives. This cycle, he believes, is largely responsible for the country’s slow progress.
“All the things we are talking about for farmers today, we have said them for years — yet we are still not doing them,” he added.
