By Wisdom JONNY-NUEKPE
The Ministry of Food and Agriculture has said it is prepared to tackle possible hindrances and challenges confronting national and regional agricultural trade policies, towards easing the free movement of agricultural produce and inputs across the sub region.
Sector Minister, Eric Opoku in his speech at the National Validation Workshop for the Implementation of the ECOWAS Agriculture Trade and Market Scorecard (EATM-S) Ghana, said, government is ready to address all violations and discrepancies in trade practices in order to ensure free movement of agricultural goods across the region in collaboration with other governments.
The West Africa Food Systems Resilience Programme (FSRP), which on behalf of government, is being implemented by MoFA, has a unified objective ‘to increase preparedness against food insecurity and improve the resilience of food systems in Ghana and the sub-region.
Component 3 objective of the FSRP, is to facilitate trade across key corridors and consolidate the region’s food reserve system and ECOWAS’ initiative to use the scorecard as a critical tool to assess compliance with regional trade policies and regulations in tandem with Ghana’s food security objectives.
In relation to this objective, the Minister applauded ECOWAS, and the FSRP as well as the EATS-S Ghana team for their work, as they worked to get hands-on insights to the realities faced by manufacturers, wholesalers, retailers, traders, forwarding agents, logistics, shipping and transport companies, among others.
A Senior Agricultural Economist at the World Bank, Ashwini Sebastian said the EATM-S programme is a flagship initiative which is to positively erupt and revolutionize agriculture in the sub region.
“It is not an adhoc projects but has a lot of technical expertise from academia and the country technical team into the design of the trade market scorecard and collection of data. I congratulate the technical team including MoFA, FDA, and GSA among others in getting to the validation stage, which is incredibly important” Madam Sebastien noted.
She said there are five other countries in the validation stage, which are Sierra Leone, Togo, Chad and Niger.
According to her, these reports by the various countries will be validated in the ECOWAS ministerial council in June this year, and must be followed by a concerted efforts by the various countries to disseminate the validated information with traders, inspectors and policy makers.
The FSRP Project Coordinator in Ghana, Mr Osei Owusu Agyeman, said the objective of the FSRP is to address food security in the region and to measure the progress of food production in the whole food value chain.
“After a year of implementation, it is imperative that we measure the progress made and take lessons to continue into the future. It is for this reason that this validation workshop is critical” he said.
