Even during the present harvest season, agriculture policy consultant Emmanuel Wullingdool is quite concerned about the cost of food and its rate of increase. According to Mr. Wullingdool, if food costs aren’t controlled, during the lean season, they might even grow more exorbitant for the average Ghanaian.
He said this when he spoke on A1 Radio’s Day Break Upper Show today, Wednesday, November 16, 2022.
“This should be what should be of concern to all the players in the sector. This is the peak. This is the harvest period so one would have expected that we should see prices coming down and that we should see food inflation drastically coming down but we still see it at these drastically high levels,” he said.
For food inflation, Savannah Region topped with 49.7 percent while the Upper West Region followed with a rate of 44.4 percent. The North East Region came in close third with a rate of 36.6 percent. The Upper East Region and the Northern Region recorded food inflation rates of 34.9 percent and 28.2 percent respectively.
This is according to the Consumer Price Index (CPI) for October released by the Ghana Statistical Service (GSS).
The continuous increases, according to Mr. Wullingdool, can be attributed to major reasons; “first, if you look at it, we started sounding the alarm bells somewhere in April and May when we were going into production. You would realise that the government took off almost all the subsidies on fertilisers. Secondly, some of the support services like ploughing went up astronomically. This was because of the element of the fuel. You can also even consider the part of transportation. These factors have ganged up for us to see these results.”
During the lean season, the situation would get worse, according to the Agric Policy Consultant.
Source: A1radioonline.com|101.1MHz|Mark Kwasi Ahumah Smith|Ghana
