Bananas and Food Security - Bioversity International

700 Les productions bananières / Bananas and food security – Session 4
Results and discussion
Socio-economic characteristics
Ninety-five farmers were interviewed of whom 65 had participated in on-farm trials in
collaboration with IITA and MoFA since 1995 and 30 had not. The numbers of respondents
from Nyinahin, Gyedu and Pramkese were 25, 44 and 26 respectively. The percentage of
female participants in this study was 74%. In addition, women made up 77% of the
farmers interviewed who are collaborating with IITA in on-farm trials. These data reflect
the fact that women are often responsible for plantain production in Ghana and it is
suggested that the development of integrated management strategies for plantain
production and methods for technology transfer should take account of this result.
The highest percentage of farmers was in the 40 and over age group (71.6%) while
28.4% of participants were between the ages of 20 and 39 and only 8.4% of the farmers
were in the 20-29 age group. This lack of younger plantain farmers is perhaps due to
problems with land acquisition, capital or the availability of more profitable occupations.
Moreover, if educated at a secondary level, villagers tend to move on to higher education
or to towns and cities to learn a trade (Schill et al. 1997). Generally, the farmers
interviewed were very experienced, having spent approximately 20 years in farming and
plantain production. Sixty percent of the farmers interviewed had some form of formal
education while the remainder had no formal education at the secondary, commercial or
technical level.
Planting material
In Gyedu, only 31.8% of farmers were able to obtain their planting material needs
entirely from their old farms. The remainders were obliged to supplement their own
supplies of planting material by purchasing suckers. Similarly, 80% of farmers in
Nyinahin and 53.8% of farmers in Pramkese had to purchase at least some of their
planting material, if not all. Various difficulties in obtaining planting material were
expressed by 75%, 72% and 42.3% of farmers at Gyedu, Nyinahin and Pramkese,
respectively. Problems included limited availability of suckers for sale, particularly in
large quantities, inability to pay prevailing prices for suckers, poor sucker production onfarm,
unreliable suppliers and the necessity to travel long distances to purchase suckers.
At the time of the study (May 1998), the cost of planting material was between 12.000
and 20.000 Ghanaian Cedis for 100 suckers, representing an approximate cost of between
120.000 and 200.000 Ghanaian Cedis (US$52-86) per hectare (average area of farmland
cultivated for plantain in the villages studied). These results indicate that costs for
individual farmers could be reduced if they were able to increase their own production of
planting material, either through the use of nurseries or improved sucker production on
their farms. For example, it was shown from on-farm trials (Mensah-Bonsu et al., these
proceedings) that sucker production could be doubled through the use of clean planting
material and improved management practices.
In Gyedu, the majority of farmers said that they did not treat suckers prior to
planting them. Nevertheless, 34.1% of farmers treated all their suckers by paring in order