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Tamale, Ghana – A Ghanaian-American agribusiness company, POP Diesel Africa Limited– has announced its intention to engage smallholder farmers in this year’s farming season to plant jatropha, an energy plant.
With hundreds of lands being made available to POP Diesel Africa by local farmers in the Yendi Municipality estimated between 3000 and 6000, the multimillion dollar company will also plant soya beans and orange fleshed sweet potatoes alongside the jatropha plants.
Speaking at a press briefing in Tamale on Wednesday– Claude David Convisser, Managing Director of POP Diesel Africa, said the company would process the soya beans into milk and meat substitute called textured soy protein.
According to him, soya meat has more protein than lean beef whereas soya milk was as much nutritious as cow milk. “Both products are far less expensive than their counterparts supplied by animals and can store on the shelf without refrigeration safely and nearly indefinitely”, he explained.
Under its trade name Alafei Foods (healthy foods in Dagbani) and relying on its textured soy protein, Mr. Convisser said POP Diesel Africa had proposed to the Ghana School Feeding Programme to deliver a tasty meal to each school child across the country.
“This meal satisfies one-third of the child’s daily requirement of protein for less than 1 Ghana cedi. This will help the children of Ghana to grow big and strong, and every one of them to realise his or her full potential”, he emphasized.
He also said the company intended to establish a tractor assembling and manufacturing plant in Yendi where it would manufacture parts of its Oggun Farm Tractors and sell them for half the price of the typical imported farm tractors of comparable horsepower.
Moreover, Mr. Convisser indicated that, with the availability of the seed cake leftover from the jatropha plant, POP Diesel would generate 2 megawatts of electricity to power its food processing and industrial activities at its site 24 hours per day for a whole week, thereby increasing both jobs and profits to be shared with farmers.
Jatropha is a tropical plant which can be grown domestically or in the wild in regions such as Africa, Asia and Latin America. It is a small tree or shrub with smooth gray bark which exudes a whitish, watery-latex when cut.
Normally, this plant grows between three and five metres high, but can attain a height of up to eight or ten metres under favourable climatic conditions.
The Jatropha plant handles dryness very well including the ability to survive almost entirely off humidity in the air. Differences in yield depend on available rainfall or water. It lives and produces seeds for 50 years with minimal input.
Medicinally, jatropha is used to treat “mouth-gonorrhoea” (bad mouth odour). The branch or stem is chewed to enable the water in it go through the gums and in between the teeth to thoroughly clean and kill any dirt or bacteria.
The Northern Regional Director of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Abu Iddrisu, lauded the initiative of POP Diesel, and said their approach was quite different from other companies that came with similar initiatives but did not succeed.
He encouraged management of the company to try as much as possible to engage at least 40% or more women in the cultivation of the jatropha, soya beans and orange fleshed sweet potato.
Mr. Iddrisu cautioned that, the EPA would be on the look out to ensure that POP Diesel Africa Limited followed the right procedures in its business and that failure to adhere to any regulation or law would bring them the exact punishment as spelt out by the laws of Ghana.
By Savannahnews
