Chief Executive Officer of Chamber for Agribusiness, Anthony Morrison, has disclosed that the rising food prices in the country will likely worsen.
According to him, delay in fertiliser procurements and issues pertaining to flooding in some parts of the country will have dire consequence on the food price.
“Unfortunately, the situation will be quite worse this year. First of all because the fertilisers came late, in most of the commercial farm’s productivity, seeds or maize are planted at the same time and fertilisers are applied at the same time. At the time they did their production, they had minimum quantity of fertiliser. So, they only planted almost about 30% of what they should have done or normally do.
“Majority of the commercial farms that we know have only done just about 48 to 52% of their acreage available to them. That implies that almost 40 to 45% of acres have not been cultivated this year. Another reason is that when the fertilisers came late and they were applied, the floods came in… and over 30% of the fertilisers have been washed away”.
Anthony Morrison
Factors accountable to high food price
Touching on the reasons for hike in food prices, Mr Morrison revealed that the entrance of the pandemic resulted in panic buying which saw more than 60% increase in most of the commodities.
He further indicated that the Chamber detected the increase last year. Following this, he alerted various stakeholders to be “concerned about the emerging stories”.
“Now, after such upward increases in prices, sometimes, it takes some time for the price to stabilize. At that time the Chamber knew that it was going to happen. We called on government to institute some form of mitigation to cushion buyers and consumers. But that wasn’t done because we could have used buffer stock to do that.
“Moving forward, in May this year, we saw earlier on around January that prices of maize had started picking up tremendously from GHC58 per 50kg to GHC80 for the same 50kg. Some of these things that accounted for it at that time was that as a country… we failed to put in a national food security pandemic strategy which the chamber called for at that time. If we had done that we would have prioritised the major commodity areas [and] provide the absolute foodbanks in strategic central location. But at the time, the hotels had gone down; they were not operating. So, those who did vegetables, poultry, fruits, they all lost because majority of them do supply to the hotels”.
Anthony Morrison
Government must develop intervention program
Mr Morrison further explained that some countries have adopted “protectionism for their food”. By this, he noted that they have reduced the quantity of food that should be exported out of their country.
As such, to improve the current inflation of food prices in the country, Mr Morrison advised government to adopt sustainable strategies to avert future food crisis.
“It is time as a country we begin to take strategic effort. This year actually prices are going to shoot up. For early part of next year, we are going to have challenges with our food systems. So, we will need to import quite more. What government needs to do is to make sure that when this year’s produce is ready, we provide a mop-up strategy so we can store enough food across the country.
“There shouldn’t be any allowance for export of any food. If for any reason someone needs to export food out of the country, that must come with approval from the ministry and reasons must be given. Some of the challenges we are having with the increase in food prices is because people have hoarded food”.
Anthony Morrison
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