Operation Feed Yourself: Ghana's Agricultural Experiment

On 13 January 1972, Colonel Ignatius Kutu Acheampong — born 23 September 1931 in Kumasi, a former student at the Central University College in Winneba, and a graduate of the U.S. Army's Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas — overthrew Prime Minister Kofi Abrefa Busia's civilian government in a bloodless military coup while Busia was in London receiving medical treatment. The National Redemption Council (NRC) seized power with a single tank column rolling into Accra at dawn.

Busia had inherited an economy crippled by Nkrumah-era debts and declining cocoa prices. His December 1971 devaluation of the cedi by 44 percent under International Monetary Fund pressure provoked fury among the military, whose salaries and import purchasing power were slashed overnight. Acheampong's first act was dramatic: he repudiated $94 million in commercial debt, renegotiated state obligations, and declared that Ghana would no longer be "a beggar nation." The Apollo 568 devaluation was reversed.

In February 1972, barely a month after seizing power, Acheampong launched Operation Feed Yourself (OFY), Ghana's most ambitious agricultural programme since independence. The ideological basis was self-reliance — a conscious rejection of the colonial agricultural structure that had oriented Ghana's farming toward export crops (cocoa, palm oil, rubber) for European markets while the country imported rice, wheat, and sugar. As Stefan Meier documented in his 2012 University of Basel thesis, OFY aimed to "correct the image of a beggar nation" and transform Ghana from a food importer into a self-sufficient producer.

The programme's Five Year Plan set a target of 6 percent annual growth in agricultural output, more than double the 2.6 percent achieved under Busia between 1969-1972. It projected an increase of 800,000 new farmers by 1990 and envisioned agriculture's GDP contribution rising from 1,800 million cedis to 2,600 million cedis. Colonel Frank George Bernasko, the former Central Regional Commissioner, was appointed Commissioner for Agriculture to lead the programme.