Ghana, Let’s Go Selfish

Gone are the days when we only enjoyed assorted dishes like Jollof and plain rice during Christmas which meant eating rice only once a year. It also reminds me of the fun moments when we as children all checked if our senior sibling equally shared “Ideal Milk” Ghana’s favorite milk on each child’s bowl of rice porridge [rice water]. Yeah, I know right? Those were the days. While I was attending to some house chores seated on the kitchen stool on the morning of 30th May, 2018, I simultaneously decided to listen to the host of the Adom FM’s morning show on 106.3. He bitterly announced that the country Burkina Faso have expressed their gratitude to Ghanaians because among their production of tomatoes only Ghana purchases up to 90 per cent of their total harvest. Ghana imports fifty to seventy heavy duty trucks of tomatoes every single day from landlocked Burkina Faso. Wow, that’s miserably interesting. They are making profits from our inability just like most of other countries we deal with.

I knew from primary six that Ghana imports Tomatoes from Burkina Faso but I never imagined that we would cross 50 per cent than to even think of they thanking us for purchasing up to 90 per cent of their produce. That’s about 70,000 metric tons of the juicy red products annually. The story is no different from our rice production. If Burkina Faso our neighboring country has the strength to grow and export something as perishable as tomatoes I am only shaking my head in bated breath of what next they will be making money from in addition to what we already buy from them. Ghana has a relatively high rainfall compared to Northern Nigeria and Mali and rice can be grown almost everywhere clearly showing that we should do more, but checks by the Ghana News Agency reveled that apart from a few farmers in the south of the Volta Region who have access to machines like combine harvesters, threshers and power tillers, hundreds of other rice farmers still rely on cutlass and hoe for land preparation and sickle for harvesting.

Times have changed, people do more of white color jobs now and can’t go through the trouble of preparing “banku” or pounding “fufu” when they close from work at 4:00pm and spend extra annoying hours in traffic. So the corporate man gets home exhausted and hungry, he just grabs a rice cooker and in a few minutes he takes a shower and dinner is served. That corporate mother doesn’t have time to prepare an “Asanka” of boiled plantain and cocoyam stew plus some “koobi” and sliced pear but she instead opts for rice porridge for her kids before they leave for school because she has a presentation to catch. Ghana spent 290 million dollars importing 414,000 metric tons of rice to meet local consumption needs. Times have changed together with our environment which is contributing to our consumption of rice more than ever. Example, I ate “Waakye” that morning rather than yam and dandelion stew which I had time to prepare and eat the previous night. It was indeed delicious I must say!

The second biggest commercial rice farm in Nigeria is owned by a youth in his thirties. Rotimi Williams a former journalist owns a 43,000 hector farm located at Tunga, Nasarawa state which produces 8,000 metric tons of rice per year and is still working towards doubling his output. And then we expect to win the Jollof competition whilst our country cannot produce enough of the main ingredient used in preparing the dish. Because of my seven year old brother’s love for technology, I am compelled to watch a lot of KANTANKA TV. From that station I have been made aware alongside other audience that our very own Safo Kantanka has been able to manufacture framing products like those that fight against weeds and unwanted animals [pest and parasites] and even more amazingly created natural fertilizers which apparently work more effectively than the internationally acclaimed ones without any side effects or whatsoever at all. That is great news but it’s been a while and I have not seen the government making any effort to make his product reach all farmers in Ghana. Let’s make farming enjoyable. Enough of having farmers who we claim their occupation is the backbone of our economy being the poorest. They have had enough of it. Let’s encourage more youth to go into farming. If it’s not so hard for the government to cut out a land to contractors to do some shoddy works of infrastructure and so I don’t think cutting out lands for free or at a subsidized cost to encourage youth farming will do us any harm, will it? Hopefully the one district one factory project will be in place soon enough to take care of food processing to add standard value to our raw materials.

The point is our rice intake has increased and is still increasing even at a faster pace than ever. Figures from ministry of food and agriculture in 2017 also showed that each person in Ghana annually consumes about 40kg of rice and that figure is expected to rise to about 6kg this year. The unfortunate thing is that a higher percentage of the rice we eat is not what we grow. What we grow is just not enough. I’ve worked with importers for a while and they never forget to add hundreds and in some cases thousands of bags of rice to their invoice’s and bill of loading plus other necessary documents. Go to the Tema port and see for yourselves, bags of rice being off loaded; it’s like a common house hold item.

I don’t want to ask for much. Working so hard to reach the level of exporting our own rice might seem like too much task depending on the farmer and other supporting institutions from reasons best known to them. I’m saying that just for once let’s be selfish with our food. Kind of like how king promise is selfish with his love, yeah i hope you can relate now. Why and how can we be selfish? We have done this before and it totally helped.

“Another critical move toward the promotion of agriculture by the National Redemption Council [NRC] was when it launched the programs “self-Reliance” and “operation feed yourself’. These programs instantaneously caught up with the entire classes of the Ghanaian society where backyard gardening became the order of the day even among the elites in the country. All manner of persons including professionals like public servants, housewives and security personnel engaged in the business of tilling the land in and around their houses for the purpose of growing crops and basic foodstuffs. This initiative quickly led to food availability in all homes. This action of the government ensured that, food was in abundance such that by 1975 there was not a dollar of food import into the country” Kuffuor, [2011]

“The NRC did continue with Busia’s Rice Revolution. The NRC launched ‘Operation Produce Rice’. Specific banks were asked to give out generous loans to rice farmers throughout the country. This monetary motivation was offered to rice growers such that by 1974-5 season alone the country witnessed an unprecedented rice harvest. The Government Rice Mills in Tamale was flooding with Paddy Rice of 401,528 bags in 1974-5 season alone. The private sector recorded over 100,000 bags of rice with Mencilo Mills being the chief buyer having purchased as much as 60,000 bags of rice. 1973-4 seasoned recorded the highest number of bags of rice production in the region of 90,500 bags by Mencilo. In fact, by 1957 there was hardly any importation of any kind into the country” Kuffuor, [2011]

“Another achievement of the Limann government was that he made agriculture his major priority. The government was not in favor of the idea of importing food from other countries whilst it concomitantly abounds in arable land. In this regard a two-year agricultural program was immediately launched. Farmers were given incentives in the form of fair producer prices and where necessary, machinery and expect advice. In no time, food became abundant on the Ghanaian market and queue for food became a thing of the past. Thus Ghanaians became extremely excited” Kuffuor, [2011]

Rotimi Williams has a social responsibility initiative where he trains secondary school students in the production and economics of rice farming. He also trains Fulani women in the art of rice production. Ghana can do same or even better at the rice growing sectors like Tamale, Bolgatanga, Ho, Nkwanta, Asutsuare among others.

My mother loves our local rice. The well packaged ones such as ‘OmaneBa’, ‘DadaBa’, and ‘Gold Star’ from GhanaMade are very nice but she has this myth that they are probably as chemically harmful as the imported ones because they have been processed by passing the grains through some machines and thus buys the no value added “olonka” local rice on the market. I mean I’m yet to taste the Edwumawura Perfumed Rice produced from the Worawora rice mill in the Volta Region which is a proud addition to the Ndoum Groupe of companies. Ghanaians ought to change their negative attitude and reservation toward consumption of value added local products against imported food items. Anytime she does that it means i have to take time and pick debris like, stones, sand and husk from the grains or risk eating gravels for dinner. You go ahead to wash it and the water looks like feeder road pothole containing a puddle of water after rainfall. I hope we now understand a little bit of why some rice consumers would prefer imported rice over the locally made ones. If we can’t add standard value to them like a few Ghanaian made that are on the market, lets at least make them debris free. We are tired of hitting our molars and premolars against little rocks while eating our own home grown rice.

Rice is now used in a lot of ways. We have it in baby foods like “Cerelac” from Nestle Ghana, bread, noodles and cakes. Talk about our morning rice porridge which I still proudly call “rice water”. The braised rice; oh my gosh the aroma of “ɛmo ne angwa” with hot grinded pepper as well as the scramble for “kanzo” like how the Europeans struggled for Africa. Muni Maame’s “waakye” that she cooks every morning in the market not forgetting Adwoa Mansah’s plain rice, the yellow rice our caterers cook and feed to sympathizers at funerals and the mouthwatering “waakye” our own Ghanaian chef Elijah Amoo prepared for Queen Elizabeth. The Jollof competition to which we lost to our brother Nigeria and even the fried rice at papaye restaurant and kempinski hotel. We as Ghanaians should continue to enjoy all of these great foods in peace without fearing that they were made with Chinese rubber rice but our own home grown rice. Is that too much to ask for right now?

We can do this!
Rice seems to be the most important cereal and major staple in Ghana. Let’s be selfish, thinking of exporting our rice to the international market might seem like too much of a task for us so the least we could do is to provide quality and quantity of what we consume which according to statistics is quite a lot. Thus we would reduce import of rice, grow more of our own and circulate internally generated revenue to strengthen our economy and then eventually before we know it after a few years of being selfish we begin exporting to generate foreign exchange. What a great place Ghana will be. If we can cater for only the rice demand of Ghana, just imagine the amount of money we will be saving ourselves; the amount of money traders will save from some corrupt hands of some clearing agents who use the Microsoft paint application to change figures and the money we will save as a nation to import thousands of bags of rice into the country. Just imagine it!

Reference: Kuffuor P.A, k4series: concise note on African and Ghanaian history, padmore-mulimedia, koforidua, 2011.

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