Minister urges African countries to pay attention to food security

Elmina, Mar 17, GNA- The Minister of Finance and Economic Planning, Mr Kwadwo Baah-Wiredu, on Monday said food security was an issue that should be given due attention by African governments and not under-rated.

He appealed to Regional Member Countries (RMCs) of the African Development Bank (ADB) support group to factor food security programmes into their national development agendas to forestall escalated food prices in order to enhance socio-economic development. Mr Baah-Wiredu said this when he opened a five-day "sub-regional workshop on Allocation of Concessional Resources" at Elmina. He said his ministry was working in collaboration with the ministries of Food and Agriculture and Local Government on measures to enhance food security.

The workshop, which is being organized by the ADB in collaboration with the government, is to enhance understanding of the performance-based allocation (PBA) framework of the ADB. The PBA system endeavours to balance countries' development performances and needs and the workshop is aimed at equipping the participants with its features to enable them engage in high level dialogue with ABD officials on their countries' African Development Fund (ADF) allocations, the grants and loans components. The ADF resources, which are replenished every three years, have increased to US$8.9billion dollars for ADF XI, in 2007, from US$5.4 billion for ADF X in 2006.

The participants, who include members of parliament and staff of the ADB, are drawn from Ghana, the Gambia, Liberia, Sierra Leone and Nigeria, with some consultants from the World Bank and Resident Representatives of the ADB in Ghana, Tanzania and Ethiopia attending. The minister said he was happy that Ghana was hosting the workshop after the conclusion of the "successful" ADF-XI replenishment consultations in London, and noted that the ADB group has each year, since 1999, allocated the bulk of its Concessional resources to its 40 low income ADF countries using the PBA system.

Mr Baah-Wiredu said with a view to enhancing the prospect of timely achievement by the RMCs of some of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), the ADB and other development partners were becoming increasingly selective.

He said they were scaling up their support for infrastructure, water and sanitation, agriculture and food security, promotion of good governance and in meeting critical needs health and education. He said the government of Ghana was focusing on growing the economy by promoting infrastructural development, notably, roads, energy and more recently, the oil industry.

Mr Baah-Wiredu said as a result, the nation's budget had been designed to bring Ghana closer to its vision of a middle income economy and her demand for concessionary resources are therefore increasing. He said in contrast with demand, concessional resources from the ABD were scarce and limited and that key factors in the allocation guidelines such as policy and institutional framework for poverty reduction, coherent macro-economic policies and the quality of governance and public sector management, offered a transparent and objective tool for the allocation of funds to regional member ADF eligible countries.

The ADB Resident Representative in Ghana, Mr Alieu Jeng, said the new policy framework for resource allocation focused on growth, infrastructural and private sector development, while it also sought to ensure increased transparency and accountability as well as strengthen coordination and harmonization among development partners. He said these are imperative to enable countries including Ghana to accelerate their visions of attaining middle income status.