Bush burning threatening food security
The Northern Regional Minister, Moses Bukari Mabengba, has attributed the growing food insecurity in the area to the increasing spate of bush burning, indiscriminate felling of trees and improper land management, which seriously destroy farmlands, and also intensify climate change effects.
He said a recent assessment by the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) indicated that about 5% of Ghana's population was food insecure. This covered the population who were constrained in terms of the physical availability of food, ease of accessibility to food, and how food supply was sustained.
Unfortunately, according to him, a greater proportion of the population considered to be food insecure was located in Northern Ghana - comprising the Upper West, Upper East and Northern regions.
Mr. Moses Mabengba, who was addressing a one-day regional conference in Tamale organised by Community Life Improvement Programme (CLIP), a Tamale-based non-governmental organisation (NGO), on climate change, described the phenomenon as unacceptable.
The conference, which was on the theme: 'Bushfires, climate change and food security in Northern Ghana', was intended to examine various human-induced agricultural activities, their impact on climate change, and strategies for the adoption of climate change coping mechanisms.
The participants were drawn from the Ministry of Food and Agriculture, research and academic institutions, non-governmental organisations, farmer-based organisations, the media and metropolitan, municipal and district assemblies (MMDAs).
According to the Northern Regional Minister, notwithstanding the efforts of the government to curtail the effects of climate change and bush burning, to ensure food security in the country, the onus lay on the citizenry to protect the environment to ensure their sustainable livelihoods.
Mr. Moses Mabengba commended CLIP, through its Food for Life (F4L) project, for organising such an important conference to address these challenging concerns affecting the resource-poor farmers in Northern Ghana.
Abubakari Mutari, F4L Focal Person at CLIP, in a power-point presentation, explained that the F4L initiative was to provide for insecure farmer households opportunities to improve their household food security situation, through climate change adaptation strategies.
He noted that the short-term objective of the F4L was to improve linkages between research and farm household practices in vulnerable communities, through the dissemination and adoption of climate resilient technologies.
Mr. Mutari stated that the goal of the programme was that 60% of farmers in 30 communities in the Northern Region would learn to apply localised and preventive strategies in addressing climate change.
CLIP, as an organisation, is doing this through awareness creation/animation of climate change and its effects, building a knowledge/resource pool to serve as a reference point for Food Security and Climate Change resilience technologies, testing and promoting innovations and building concerted efforts to tackle Food Security and Climate Change issues among others, he stressed.