07 – 08 – 2009 SOYBEAN CONFERENCE
A national conference on Soybean Stakeholder Value Chain is taking place in Kumasi. The two day conference organized by Venture Capital Trust Fund is being attended by research scientists, farmers, lecturers, and industrialists. It seeks to identify the priorities, constraints and opportunities for soybean crop that will enable management of the Venture Capital Trust Fund to develop an efficient and sustainable business model for financing a Soybean Value Chain. The Soybean has been described by many as the Wonder Crop due to its invaluable properties as a storehouse of very important minerals and elements needed by man and animals by way of nutrition. It is also believed that soybean can pass as a food security and cash crop for the economy. The Deputy Minister of Food and Agriculture, Yaw Effah Baafi who opened the conference charged the participants to be guided by the objectives of the conference and strive to build and develop the value chain and the business model for the development of soybean. He said government will collaborate with institutions that have programmes to address food insecurity. According to him, soybean value chain development project is nothing more than a management process of ensuring that, all stakeholders involved in the production, processing and marketing of soybean add value to all that they do, to ensure that at the end of it all the nation can boast of food that is valuable in quantity and quality, raw material that will be valued for processing and soybeans that can value on the market, to ensure increased food security and poverty reduction. The Chief Executive of the Venture Capital Trust Fund, Nana Osei Bonsu said the Fund was established by an act to provide financial resources for the development and promotion of venture capital financing to small and medium enterprises in the country. He described as unfortunate, that out of more than 20 million arable hectares of land for food and crop production in the country only four million hectares are being cultivated. Nana Osei Bonsu said Sorghum farmers are being supported to engage in large scale cultivation and Guinness Ghana limited is providing already market for the product.