By Elizabeth Larkwor Baah
Tema, Aug. 15, GNA – Mr. Edward Kareweh, General Secretary of the General Agriculture Workers Union (GAWU), says prioritising investments in agriculture is a sure way to manage inflation in the country.
He said managing food inflation will have a significant impact on the reduction of national inflation since it had been the major driving force of inflation in the country.
Mr. Kareweh told the Ghana News Agency in an interview in Tema that the continuous rise of food inflation was driven by both domestic and external factors, explaining that the external factors included the importation of inflated foods into the country.
“That is to say that if there is inflation in the importing country, they’ll put that inflation on their produce, and we’ll import those products into our country, and we’ll have to increase the price to be able to recover the increase that has occurred in the importing country.”
He mentioned that domestic causes were due to the high cost of production, less food produced recently, and the high taxes being paid on goods and tools needed to make the production process flexible for stakeholders in the agricultural sector.
“If you have a country like ours where we import almost everything, it means that when there’s a global dynamics, we’ll suffer it so much. That is the reason why the government says it’s as a result of the Ukraine-Russia war.”
The Secretary GAWU noted that the prioritisation and investment must be done in a manner in which loopholes through which waste occurred were blocked immediately as the waste in the sector in previous years negatively impacted the activities of farmers.
“In the past, we saw that there was a wastage in the investment in agriculture; the fertiliser that was supplied in large quantities was smuggled out of the country.”
He said the survival of humans to a large extent depended on food, saying that ” no person can afford to forgo food no matter their level of income, so food is critical and the government must prioritise the agriculture sector.”
GNA