The Minister for Food and Agriculture, Dr Owusu Afriyie Akoto has been tasked to commit more resources to institute an efficient and effective food redistribution strategy. This would mean that in areas where there is abundant food, there will be a deliberate government strategy to cart that food to other areas in the country where there is scarcity.
Professor David Millar, the Founder and Vice-Chancellor of the Millar Institute for Transdisciplinary and Development Studies (MITDS) shared these thoughts on A1 Radio’s Day Break Upper East Show.
Professor Millar called on the Minister to focus on food distribution; a more complicated part of the agriculture process.
“When you’re the Minister in charge of Food and Agriculture, your greatest responsibility is to ensure food distribution. Where there is a bumper harvest, you move it to where there is scarcity. Where there is scarcity, you also try to find out ways of dealing with that and ways of sustaining the bumper harvest. That is a more difficult to manage, as a Minister, than productivity and supplying fertilizers”.
“To manage the redistribution of food is difficult and that is where his professional skills are needed. I think that it is not fair the way the comments are going,” he said.
To deal with the uneven distribution of food in the country, Professor Millar asked the government to strengthen the warehousing policy, properly resource the National Buffer Stock Company (NAFCO) and ensure the construction of roads leading to known farming areas.
“Storage systems offer you an opportunity for redistribution. You know what you have in each silo, you know what you do not have in certain areas, you also know the market prices and then you redistribute. That is what you do,” he said.
Meanwhile, the Ministry of Food and Agriculture is being called upon to deploy strategies that would seek to enhance the distribution of food in the country. This means that in areas where there are certain food products in abundance, the Ministry would facilitate the transportation of the food to other places in the country where there are none.
This would help with the availability of food across the country and help stabilize the prices of those food products.
Emmanuel Wullingdool, an Agriculture Policy Advisor shared these sentiments when he spoke on A1 Radio’s Day Break Upper East Show.
Source: A1radioonline.com|101.1MHz|Mark Kwasi Ahumah Smith|Ghana
