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The Ministry of Food and Agriculture has announced allocating an amount of GH₵3.1m to the national taskforce on the Fall Army Worms (FAWs) to undertake a comprehensive action plan beginning October 2017 to March 2018 as part of measures to prevent the resurgence of the pests later next year when the planting season begins.

The allocated amount, which forms part of the GH₵15,857,280 released by cabinet earlier this year to control the epidemic, will be used to organise radio and TV talk shows across the country to sensitise and create more awareness of the prevalence of the pest and the consequences on the economy and the livelihood of the farm families.

The ministry has already paid for airtime to play jingles at Unique FM and Peace FM to supplement the free airtime provided by the radio stations as part of their social responsibilities.
It also paid for airtime for UTV, TV3, Adom TV and GTV, as well as Peace FM, Asempa FM, Adom FM, Joy FM, Citi FM and Unique FM to appear on talk shows, which will commence in the second week of October 2017.

From the amount, education materials have been printed and distributed to the farmers and the general public on how to quickly detect the pests.

Farmers in most farming communities will also be sensitised through local information centres, fora, meetings, farm visits and, in some cases, during church services.

Announcing this at a meeting on FAWS to review the status of the FAWS, Dr Afriyie Akoto, Minister for Food and Agriculture, explained that although the aforementioned measures have already been in existence, it is prudent the ministry continues the fight since FAWs had come to stay.

He noted that the ministry identified inadequate human resource and knowledge on the pests as other key challenges that have hampered the fight against the pests, and there was the need to address those challenges.

“The challenges faced in the management of the Fall Army Worm (FAW) include absence of functional taskforce in most of the MMDAs for effective co-ordination of FAW management activities; inadequate human resources to monitor the strategies to manage the pest; and the delay in distributing the insecticides from the regions to the districts,” he stressed.

According to MOFA, the pests have so far affected 115,000 hectares of farm fields across all the 10 regions of the country, but Dr Akoto says the pests have been defeated and will not negatively impact the country’s food security.

The Fall Army Worm (FAW) was first reported on maize in the Yilo Krobo District of the Eastern Region in April 2016 and quickly dispersed through all the regions in Ghana, where it feeds mainly on maize and other crops such as sorghum, millet, okro, and rice, across thousands of hectares of land mostly managed by smallholder family farmers.