The Vice-President, Dr Mahamudu Bawumia, has called for a concerted effort among countries in the sub-region to strategise on transforming agriculture to attain sustainable food security.

He said overcoming challenges such as financing, floods, drought, pest and disease control; climate change variabilities and post-harvest losses would depend on the political commitment of the countries and how they prioritised agriculture.

Dr Bawumia, who was addressing the closing session of a two-week international conference on West Africa food security storage system in Accra yesterday, said: “Political commitment is the only way to salvage our countries from rudimentary systems of production and ensure high yields and large-scale outputs of our food crops.”

Event

The conference formed part of the process of assessing key achievements of the five-year implementation of the West Africa food security storage system.

The programme is being supported by the G20 with financial assistance from the European Union (EU) and technical support from the French Development Agency (AFD) and the Spanish International Cooperation Agency for Development (AECID).

The conference which commenced on April 28, 2021, was attended by Ministers of Agriculture from ECOWAS member states, the Commissioner of Agriculture, Environment and Water Resources of ECOWAS and the donor group of the Economic Community of West Africa Agricultural Policy (ECOWAP). Some participated through a virtual platform.

Food insecurity

Dr Bawumia said statistics showed that within the last seven years, people facing food insecurity in the sub-region had exploded from two million to 27 million as of the end of the last cropping season.

He described the situation as unacceptable, especially when agriculture offered the best hope of liberating economies of countries.

“We all know that our countries are endowed with virtually all the resources needed to propel economic development, with agriculture as the major driving force.

We have arable land, human resource, water bodies, varieties of food crops and a relatively favourable climate condition. We, therefore, have no excuse,” Dr Bawumia said.

He described the meeting as a call to action that presented an opportunity for sharing country experiences and knowledge and also generating consensus on the way forward to building strategic stock reserves in the sub-region.

According to the Vice-President, plans to build a strategic food storage system for the sub-region was a step in the right direction since it would help address the dire situation of emerging hunger facing the people.

He expressed appreciation to the donor community and other development partners and said without their support, “the modest achievements we have made in our various countries may not have been possible”.

Dr Bawumia also commended ECOWAS for its proactive step in organising the conference and said the assembly of such high-profile government officials from countries in the sub-region signalled a strong commitment to a shared purpose of building a robust and resilient food storage system.

Ghana’s story

On the situation of agriculture in the country, Dr Bawumia mentioned a government flagship programme, Planting for Food and Jobs (PFJ), which he said focused on enhancing productivity, scaling up production of food commodities, promoting value addition and building sustainable food security for the country.

“Four years of implementing the PFJ programme has led to an increase in farmer participation from 202,000 to 1,500,000 in 2020,” he said.

The Vice-President also mentioned the development of infrastructure such as warehouses, greenhouse technology villages, feeder roads and irrigation schemes across the country as well as the establishment of Ghana Commodity Exchange, a platform for providing a link between buyers and sellers in the food and raw material value chain.

He said the government had also established a commercial poultry farm in the Savanna and Northern regions with a 37 million dollar facility from the Africa Development Bank.

Source: graphic.com.gh