ECOWAS food donation timely but…
The country must be grateful to the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) for its food donation.
Under its Regional Food Security Reserve programme, the regional bloc yesterday handed over 500 metric tonnes of cereals to the Ministry of Food and Agriculture (MOFA).
The cereals, made up of 4,327 bags of maize, 2,015 bags of sorghum, 200 bags of millet and 3,458 bags of rice, are to be distributed as food grants to eight regions in Ghana experiencing drought disrupting crop production.
The beneficiary regions are Northern, Upper East, North East, Savannah, Upper West, Bono, Bono East and Oti.
In recent weeks, it has, for instance, been reported that the Upper West Region is facing a severe crisis as a prolonged drought has caused crops to wither.
The ECOWAS donation did not come by accident as the the Regional Food Security Reserve (RFSR) was created in 2013 by a Supplementary Act to the revised ECOWAS Treaty, as usual, with clear objectives.
The RFSR is a regional solidarity mechanism for Member States to: improve the response to food and nutrition crises at the local, national, and regional levels; reduce dependence on international aid; and promote a storage system geared towards emergency response.
The history of the RFSR has its root in the food crises that emerged in the 1980s in West Africa, with the severity in the Sahel countries like Mali and Chad.
If nothing at all, since natural forces can derail crop production at any time, all ECOWAS countries should have learned to embrace the third objective of the RFSR, which is promoting a storage system geared towards emergency response.
This is where the Ghanaian Times thinks successive political administrations of this country have failed the people.
Receiving the ECOWAS donation yesterday, the Minister of Food and Agriculture, Dr Bryan Acheampong, made a plea for additional 10,000 tonnes of the cereals to help strengthen the resilience of populations affected by the difficult food situation.
The plea is not the problem but his pledge that in order to store the foods, the government would build a 100,000-tonne capacity silo in each region to store grains yearly to cushion farmers during the dry season.
If the Ghanaian Times got him right, there is only an 80,000 metric tonne-capacity warehouse existing in the country and as the minister himself testifies to it, this is insufficient, hence the need to build 100,000-tonne silos or warehouses for grain reserves in every region of the country.
It is an open secret in the country that the politicians ignore providing certain facilities until crisis time, when they bring them in as interventions to score political marks.
This is a poor approach to national development and service to the people, particularly the vulnerable who would have no one to turn to for help when particular crises erupt and affect them.
There are less than three months to elections and it shouldn’t surprise anyone that the pledge to build silos can be a campaign promise.
The country’s managers should be proactive rather than adopting the fire-fighting approach to solving problems, which rather exposes their negligence, ineptitude, insensitivity, carelessness and all the related negative attitudes towards their duties and the people they should serve.
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