THIS year's World Rural Women's Day was marked on Monday with a call on all major players in the country to provide adequate support and put in measures to enable women to contribute their part to building the economy. The day, celebrated on October 15, was a prelude to World Food Day which was also marked world-wide yesterday.
Out of the basic necessities of life such as clothing and shelter, food is a requirement that nobody can afford to do without. Everybody needs food for survival but to some of the people in certain parts of the world, the struggle to find food is a luxury.
But in fulfilment of our basic needs, do we have to struggle to find food or lack food in the midst of plenty? Food is a basic human right, yet about 800 million people in the world still go hungry everyday. No doubt the World Food Day, set aside by the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), aims at heightening public awareness of the plight of the world's hungry and malnourished and to encourage people world-wide to take action against hunger.
In a speech read on his behalf at a flag raising ceremony in Accra to mark World Food Day this year on the theme “The right to food — make it happen”, the Minister of Food and Agriculture, Mr Ernest Debrah, said although every individual had the right to food, all Ghanaians should help to eliminate hunger through increased productivity of food
The critical challenge that must be addressed in order to attain food sufficiency is how to make land available to those who need this factor of production to improve incomes and reduce poverty. Majority of the population in our country rely on land for food production. But the land tenure system, which deprives many people of their rights to land, means that the status quo will have to go away if we can avoid a situation where millions go hungry.
The DAILY GRAPHIC believes that the solution to the problem of land tenure lies in the hands of the government and landowners to initiate major reforms so that those interested in agriculture can have access to land to produce abundant food. This is the only way Ghana can meet the target of halving the number of hungry people by 2015.
Let us raise the alarm about the challenges in major land reforms as the solution will not be found in business as usual. In order to move forward and clear all the hurdles, the state must empower the people to take action to end hunger in our society. When the land tenure is reviewed to make land available to all, Ghana shall move away from the irony of poverty and hunger in the midst of large tracts of fallow lands. In countries where the governments waged a relentless war against food insufficiency, hunger is in retreat.
The same target can be attained if more precise focus is directed at controlling hunger and enhancing agricultural development within the broader goal of poverty reduction and food self-sufficiency. Special incentives should be given to those who want to go into farming and the output will be overwhelming. Today, cocoa output has nearly doubled from the low tonnage in the 1990s because of the incentive packages introduced by the government.
The DAILY GRAPHIC calls on the government to introduce similar incentives into general agriculture and the outcomes will meet our expectations. The banks must also be encouraged to extend credit facilities to farmers in time while agricultural inputs and extension services must be readily available.
That food is culture, food is life and food is nature is demonstrated persuasively by Jared Diamond, a Pulitzer award winner, when he said in one of his books that “when people start messing with nature in ways that can't be sustained, a society's very existence can be threatened".
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