Ghana's food security situation being threatened by bad practices

Koforidua, April 11, GNA - The team leader of the Land and Water Management Project, Mr Per-ove Lindeman, has cautioned that Ghana could experience serious food security problems if the current rate of soil erosion, bush burning and other forms of crude farming practices were allowed to continue.

He said there should be the "strong need to halt environmental degradation especially soil erosion" if the country wants to maintain or improve upon its current food production level, through environmentally sustainable farming practices.

Mr Lindeman was speaking to the GNA in an interview during a one-day Land and Water Management Awareness Creation Seminar for district assemblies in the Eastern Region at Koforidua, on Tuesday.

The seminar seeks to strengthen the capacity of government and people, especially rural farming communities to manage and invest in the maintenance of environmental assets through the adoption of improved resource use practices.

Mr Lindeman noted that though Ghanaian farmers were susceptible to innovations, many of them do not know how to implement the new methods to replace the old ones.

He said the project, which is a component of the Ghana Environment Resource Management Project, has adopted and implemented various interventions such as controlling erosion in settlements.

Other interventions are planting and cultivation across the slope, use of manure, training of fire volunteer squads in order to restrain the constraints imposed on soil erosion and fertility loss by bush fires.

Mr Lindeman said to date, the project has been implemented in 28 districts and 598 communities throughout the country with the focus of rekindling a new awareness among farmers on the need to sustain the land resource base on which all agricultural activities depend.

The Eastern Regional Director of Agriculture, Dr Alfred Asante, said, "land is an important factor for the sustenance of man and that anything done to destroy it impinges on the very existence of man".

He said the project had taken cognisance of the fact that rural households and communities that manage the land should be allowed to take responsibility for and be assisted to manage the land with which they identify.

He said the near doubling of population every twenty years, had resulted in both the shortening of the bush fallow recuperative periods to unsuitable short duration and the spread of cultivation into more fragile areas, which degrade rapidly under improper management.

Dr Johnson Bonuah, Senior Programmes Officer of the Environmental Protection Agency in charge of the Eastern Region, said water issues were getting to a critical state.

This is because most agricultural activities, especially farming, were dependent on water and there was, therefore, the need for farmers to stop cultivating very close to water bodies to prevent silting.