And he put it so beautifully and directly factual, that“Every bullet, every bomb, every shell that hits a target in Ukraine, hits our pockets and our economies in Africa,” our president H.E. Nana Akufo-Addo must be applauded.
But the question is, why should it be so? Why should a country, like Ukraine with a land size of almost 604,000 km² and arable land of about 400,000 km² and very far from Africa, grow enough food to feed a continent, almost fifty-one times its size?
Ideally, Africa, have allowed ourselves to be directed by the super-power nations who dictate what we should and should not do.
Before Rawlings gate-crashed into the national scene in 1979, Ghana, even though there were economic challenges, had Ghanaian owned businesses growing and spreading over to parts of Africa, making them multinational companies.
In his jealousy and envy, he confiscated these industries and businesses, nationalised them, and after collapsing them, he handed them over to Western owned companies.
In his desire to bring down every business owned by Ghanaians, he first banned Ghanaian businesses and services, gave very lax terms of service to foreign-owned companies while saddled Ghanaian counterparts with higher taxes and very unattractive terms.
He then collapsed the Asutsuare and Komenda sugar factories. Then he signed us into binding international trade agreements, which among many things demanded us not to subsidized agriculture.
In other binding trade agreements, Rawlings opened up the way for the importation of food products we earlier produced here, namely chicken, sugar and rice.
And with rice, when the Kufuor administration took over government, his dedicated agriculture minister, Courage Quarshigah, went out of his way to openly promote local rice and sought to make sure that our rice farmers had all they needed to make rice production easier and attractive for them.
The NDC “owned” television station, TV 3, came out with a documentary during prime-time to campaign against local rice.
Today, our poultry industry which was internationally acclaimed during the seventies, is now almost extinct. In place, chemically induced poultry meat which have been stored for years and with little nutritional value, are been loaded on us. Rice imported into Ghana taste like chaff compared to rice sold abroad.
As it is today, Ghana spends over $200 million a year on wheat importation; over $300 million on poultry; almost $400 million on rice, over $150 million on fish and almost $250 million on sugar. A cool $1.3 billion to import commodities we could produce here and even have better substitutes.
With this government’s great drive to promote food production, especially in Planting for Food and Jobs (PFJ), it is very ridiculous that the opposition sees nothing good here.
Unnecessary attacks and criticisms labelling the policy as a failure, without coming out with better alternatives, the NDC took the path it knows best, by convincing Ghanaians that anything NPP is nothing good.
Meanwhile an ex-NDC MP who took advantage of the PFJ is all over giving good testimonies. The NDC had severally warned him to just shut up.
Today, in these economic challenging times for the first time, food is available, however it is expensive because down the delivery chain, transportation cost and selfish desires of middlemen to make hay while the sun of economic crunch shines, price of food item could increase twenty-fold in the market.
What lessons are we to learn here? Given that God who put us on this side of the globe, provided for all we will need for ourselves. Colonialisation introduced strange foods and drugs to us and we seem stuck to them, ignoring what is traditionally available here.
We just cannot throw away what has always been here and very available to us. In my opinion, we should immediately embark on the Ethiopia Way. This Eastern African nation, on the back of the Ukraine crisis, has started wheat production on such a large scale that within a few years it can export the commodity to African countries.
Our move should include fully implementing the gazetted zoning of the country which clearly maps out areas for food production. And then, government must take a look at the land turner system and invite land owners to the table and get them to lease out their lands for food production.
With no way of going round the binding agreement of not subsidising food production, government could encourage banks and other businesses to subsidise food production for an attractive cut in taxes and other obligations.
The food production must be made very attractive to the youth so that most of them will go into it and enjoy what they do.
It must be added here that food producers must not take their produce to the market but rather have it taken at the farmgate.
Lastly, since we have Friday wear, Ghana must institute two days out of the week where only Ghanaian dishes would be served in all eateries across the country.
Government must endeavour to make sure that only Ghanaian dishes are served during state functions, and to top this, GhanaWeek must be instituted to last the first seven days of March to coincide with our Independence Day celebrations.
During this period only Ghanaian foods must be served publicly and by the way, not forgetting the proverbial Ghana Wear.
Hon Daniel Dugan
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect The Chronicle’s stance.
