Economist with the Institute of Statistical, Social and Economic Research (ISSER), Professor Peter Quartey, has urged the government to pay more attention to the policies it has adopted for the country’s agricultural sector following a dip in the sector’s contribution to the country’s GDP figures for the first quarter of the year.
The Gross Domestic Product which is the total monetary value of all the goods and services produced in the country grew by 6.7 % for the first quarter of this year. Agriculture contributed 2.2 % which was the least out of the three subsectors.
In an interview with Citi Business News, Professor Peter Quartey said the government must review its agricultural policies to improve the sector’s performance.
“Growth in agriculture was woefully inadequate growing by some 2.2 percent at the back of planting for food and jobs and all the investments we have made in fertilizers and what have you, so that is not good news, I think then industry did quite well although it was driven mainly by oil”.
“We have to tap from the growth from oil to diversify the economy and invest some of the oil resources into some key sectors like agriculture so that we don’t suffer from the problem of economic stagnation.
I think it calls for further investigation we need to find out what exactly happened within the crop sector especially not the whole agric sector but the crop sector because that is where we have invested a lot of money,” he said.
Provisional GDP Q1 2019
Provisional figures released by the Ghana Statistical Service (GSS) shows that Ghana’s Gross Domestic Product(GDP) grew by 6.7 percent in the first quarter of 2019.
This is compared to the same period in 2018 which was at 5.4 percent.
Speaking at a press conference, the Government Statistician, Professor Samuel Kobina Annim pointed out that the non-oil GDP growth for the first quarter of 2019 was at 6.0 percent year-on-year compared to 4.2 percent recorded in the first quarter of 2018.