Ghana is among a few African countries likely to meet, ahead of schedule, the millennium target of cutting poverty by half in 2015, President John Evans Atta Mills announced yesterday.

President Mills, who said this in a speech read on his behalf by Vice President John Mahama in Accra yesterday, attributed the feat to better focus on agriculture, political stability and co-ordination.

The occasion was a roundtable on Ghana’s Medium Term Agriculture Sector Investment Plan organised under the auspices of the ECOWAS Agriculture Policy and the Comprehensive African Agriculture Development Programme (CAADP) of the NEPAD.

The two day conference will lead to signing by Ghana of the CAADP compact, which commits African government to raising agricultural growth to at least six per cent a year.

To achieve that target, African governments that have signed the compact have agreed to increase public investment in agriculture by a minimum of 10 per cent of their national budgets-substantially more than the four to five per cent average they committed previously.

Throwing more light on the fact that the country is on course to achieving the millennium target of halving poverty by the target date, President Mills said Ghana experienced an average agricultural growth rate of 4.3 per cent between 1984 and 2009.

That relatively high growth rate in agriculture, he said, caused radical decline in poverty, from a high of 52 per cent rate during the early 1990s to roughly half that level at present.