Solidaridad's Sustainable West Africa Palm oil Programme (SWAPP) hosted a workshop last week to share its Best Management Practices on palm oil agronomy. The key message from the workshop was one of optimism, namely that: yields in Ghana and West Africa region can reach 15-16 tonnes per hectare on well-managed farms. In other words, BMP holds promise for enhancing both yields and livelihoods.
SWAPP, in collaboration with the International Plant Nutrition Institute (IPNI) and other stakeholders in the oil palm sector, are piloting Best Management Practices (BMP) initiatives in Ghana. Due to the need to supplement a limited domestic supply, the BMP initiative aims to enable farmers to adopt best agronomic practices in order to boost production to meet the huge demand in a country that already currently imports 70,000 tonnes of oil palm.
Since 2012, a total of 20 BMP have been established on selected farms in the Eastern, Central, Western, and Ashanti regions of Ghana in order to demonstrate benefits of the BMP approach that focuses on best agronomic and management practices to improve yields and the profitability of the sector.
Thus far in Ghana 400 smallholder farmers have been trained in BMP, an additional 27 new BMP partners have adopted the practice, and as a result, 183.5 hectares of land is now under BMP. SWAPP is also expanding the BMP approach into Nigeria and Ivory Coast.
