Draft policies to ensure food security - Senior Consultant to stakeholders

Dr. Robert Aidoo, a senior lecturer at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST) and a consultant to the government on storage policy, has called on stakeholders and government to develop holistic policies that will address the logistic challenges facing the Food and Agriculture industry.

Speaking at a two-day validation workshop by the National Food Buffer Stock Company (NAFCO) in Accra, Dr. Aidoo said the policy must be able to capture the transport and storage facility challenges to ensure food security in the country.

“If we want to win the war against food insecurity, we have to focus on a policy that particularly addresses storage and distribution,” he said.

Dr. Aidoo stressed that the implementation of the Ghana Food Distribution policy in the First Republic, is the only one the country has and there had not been any aggressive attempt at a food distribution programme in the country to enable the country store food in large quantities and also transport them to other parts of the continent.

He further stated that “having a policy on storage and distribution could help the country store food in huge volumes, so that when there was a challenge, there would be enough food to feed the people, including the vulnerable.”

Participants discussed two draft policy documents, namely, the national food storage policy, and a procedure manual.

However, the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of NAFCO, Mr. Abdul-Wahab Hanan, explained that the workshop was a collaboration among West African countries to provide a road map on modernizing agriculture and ensuring food security within the sub-region.

“Now that we are not in normal times, we need to guard our food security reserves and look at what we can do to increase the nutritional content of whatever food we are providing,” Mr. Hanan said.