Government Evaluates Aveyime Rice Mill

Government has constituted a committee to evaluate proposals for the utilisation of the Aveyime rice mill in the Volta Region. According to the Food and Agriculture Minister, Major Courage Quashigah, the evaluation will inform government on the state of the machinery at the project site and how it could be utilized.

The machinery, which was acquired by the Quality Grain Company has been lying idle since some former government officials were dragged to court and jailed for causing financial loss to the state. They were accused of aiding an American lady to acquire a $20 million loan through a Ghana government guarantee for the project, which did not materialize. Some experts have however described the equipment at the project site at useful for the milling of rice.

The Agriculture Minister was speaking on the future of the project at the Volta Regional Investment Conference at Ho where he made a presentation on the agriculture potentials of the Volta Region and the need for new approaches to developing such potentials.

The conference with the theme: "Toward the Economic Development of the Volta Region," was organised under the auspices of the Ministry of Trade, Industry and the President's special Initiative (PSI) and the Volta Regional Co-ordinating Council (VRCC).

Maj. Quashigah said developing the region's agriculture potentials required private investment. "We have business staring us in the face here and we are doing nothing about it," he said, adding that the Ministry of Food and Agriculture (MOFA) could only play a leading role for "somebody to pick up from there".

He said the Volta Region had the combination of all the water bodies scattered in other parts of the country, which could be used to support agricultural activities, including aquaculture and fish hatcheries.

However the Region is yet to exploit the immense potentials of horticulture, given the varieties of water bodies available to it compared with the Northern Region, which had made major inroads into the sector despite its disadvantage in water resource availability.

The dredging of the Keta Lagoon as part of the Keta Sea Defence Project, according to the Minister, has also provided a golden opportunity for cage fishing, as the traditional form of fishing in the lagoon could no longer take place.

The Agric Minister said the region needed to overcome some major obstacles, which had been stumbling blocks to the full realisation of the benefits of its potentials.

These include the attitude to land acquisition, reception towards investors, non-recognition of achievement, lack of investment in agriculture, refusal of successful indigenes to identify with the region and inflexibility in political representation, which he said had done much damage to the fortunes of the region.