Chief Executive Officer of Chamber of Agribusiness, Ghana, Anthony Morrison, has urged government to purchase all paddy rice in the system to avert rice glut in the country.
According to him, as a contingency measure, government must access some funds and buy out all paddy rice and subsequently find a way to store it properly to avert food waste in the system. Mr Morrison suggested that government can equally release the paddy to the “rice millers” to mill and supply rice to ready market.
His comments follow bags of local rice left to rot in the Norther Region as off-takers compete with imported rice.
“This is the only strategy we can use. Otherwise, from what I’m hearing from our contacts in the northern region, some are even threatening to burn down some of the paddy rice. So, this is a situation that we should be very careful of. Government should buy all paddy rice in the system. That is the way for food security because if you do not have paddy rice in the system, the poultry industry is going to suffer, the beverage industry will suffer and this will affect various other value chains within the agribusiness or agro-industry”.
Anthony Morrison
Commenting on the glut situation in the north, Mr Morrison noted that after studying the market trend, government should expect some “continued glut” in the industry with the fear of it casting a long shadow well into the “next season”. This, he explained will heavily impact on prices as it will rise “astronomically”, forcing rice farmers to abandon their planting of rice in the country.
Following this, Mr Morrison advised government to adopt the practices of countries which plant rice on a commercial scale to improve the situation in the country.
“They will do soya, they’ll do maize, they’ll d sorghum [and] they’ll do millet. So, that implies that our predicament will keep worsening. We have been advising government. We told government that we can follow the model of Argentina, Brazil [and] Thailand where government positions itself as the main seller of paddy in the country. So, government buys all paddy in the system and sells the paddy to the rice millers and also to the market suppliers. This is the only way we can go to strengthen our core production areas and [be] able to abandon the continuous importation that we are having as a country currently”.
Anthony Morrison
Mr Morrison intimated that, government buying out paddy rice from farmers will bring in a lot of revenue for government.
“But I’m afraid government has not been thinking rightly and governments before and after have not done any initiative of this nature… I think that we are also missing a lot of things in actually positioning ourselves as a major rice producing country especially in the West African sub-region where we can take a lot of advantage”.
Anthony Morrison
Touching on whether government’s buying of paddy rice is commercially viable, the CEO of Chamber of Agribusiness revealed that the same has been replicated in Thailand and the country rakes in more than “hundreds of billions of dollars annually” supplying the whole world with rice.
“And if Thailand has been able to do this, I think Ghana, using Volta Region as the pivot, we can do more than that”.
Anthony Morrison
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