General News of Friday, 13 March 2015
Source: Maxwell Okamfo Addo
Vice President Kwesi Amissah-Arthur has expressed concern about the numerous disconnections of researches findings that have been put up by scientific institutions and industries which were still on the shelves and not being used.
Vice president kwesi Amissah Arthur made the statement when a delegation from The International Potato Centre a research organisation that advances international agricultural research for food security, called on him on Wednesday 11th March 2015 at the Flagstaff
Mr Amissah-Arthur said there are lot of people in the country who don’t even know the CSIR had even done an extensive work on illegal mining and other environmental issues in the country which are well documented and are not being put to use.
He said studying most of these reports was of the believe that they should be implemented, so the need for the co-operation between the research institutions, in order to solve the problem of disconnection between them and ensure that the numerous researches that has been carried out is not shelved but made available to the appropriate organisations to use.
Vice president Kwesi Amissah Arthur lauded the IPC for its work and underscored the need for African food scientists to focus on conducting research into broader food chains.
For her part, Dr Wells said the IPC had the objective of impacting 500,000 households in Ghana by the end of 2015 and 15 million households in Africa by 2023, adding that the activities would also be tailored towards creating business opportunities for young people, as well as building relationships with some universities to build the capacity of graduate students in their desire to become entrepreneurs.
She said there was the need for a consortium to expand its activities in the areas of hunger alleviation and fighting malnutrition and announced a programme to reduce malnutrition among pregnant women and children in 500,000 households in Ghana by 2023.
According Mrs Wells even though the organisation had been in Ghana since 1990 it, however, wanted to increase its presence in the country and that sweet potato and ordinary potato had a lot of medicinal properties for reducing malnutrition in pregnant women and children and that the International Potato Centre wanted to invest more in scientific research and use those research findings to support agriculture production in the country.
Mrs. Wells also stated that sweet potato was a unique crop in terms of nutrition and had the potential to prevent blindness and reduction in stunted growth, so called for collaboration between the research institutions and the farmers to enhance the breeding of varieties and use the outcome in production.