{"id":1189372,"date":"2022-08-24T18:51:01","date_gmt":"2022-08-24T18:51:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/08\/24\/government-must-invest-in-food-security-like-it-did-with-dumsor-nana-okyir-baidoo\/"},"modified":"2022-08-24T18:51:01","modified_gmt":"2022-08-24T18:51:01","slug":"government-must-invest-in-food-security-like-it-did-with-dumsor-nana-okyir-baidoo","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/08\/24\/government-must-invest-in-food-security-like-it-did-with-dumsor-nana-okyir-baidoo\/","title":{"rendered":"Government must invest in food security like it did with dumsor &#8211; Nana Okyir Baidoo"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><\/p>\n<p>A woman selling tomatoes in a market in Dedza, Malawi, along the border with Mozambique.<\/p>\n<div id=\"article-text\" style=\"line-height: 2; letter-spacing: -0.5px;font-size: 18px;\">\n<p>                        <!--p class=\"ky_saved_articles_link\"><span class=\"ky_saved_articles_hide\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"\" class=\"ky_saved_articles_img\" alt=\"Government must invest in food security like it did with dumsor - Nana Okyir Baidoo\" title=\"Government must invest in food security like it did with dumsor - Nana Okyir Baidoo\"><\/span> Bookmark<\/p-->\n<p>Former Director of Operations at ESOKO, Nana Okyir Baidoo, says while short terms fixes are currently necessary to address food inflation in the country, government should be more interested in long term solutions.<\/p>\n<p>According to him, the current food inflation crisis, even though partly as a result of the declining cedi and fuel price hikes, is mainly a structural problem which needs to be solved.<\/p>\n<p>Speaking on JoyNews\u2019 PM Express, Nana Okyir Baidoo said, \u201cThere are quick fixes. It can get so bad that we will begin to do things like price controls, or we could begin to restrict food exports \u2013 which we have started doing. But those are short term fixes.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWhat is happening is a structural issue which is being exacerbated by other fractions such as the increase in fuel prices and then our currency depreciation. What we actually need to do is to solve the systemic price of our productivity.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cIf we are able to produce more locally and we are exporting less then we probably will be shielded a little from the effects of currency and fuel price increases.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>To halt the current food inflation, he says it may be time for government to intensify its short term fixes to reduce the burden on local consumers, without reneging on solutions to solve the crisis once and for all.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cAnd so for me I think the short term fixes are probably necessary but they\u2019re not the way to go. It is investment in high yielding varieties, investing in plants that will give us produce and agricultural inputs like fertilizer and co. locally that will help so we don\u2019t have to depend on phosphates from China which has been banned since last year.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThings like that which will go a long way to solving this problem long term just as we did for dumsor in 2012\/13 and we don\u2019t have a dumsor problem now. I think the same level of investments, the same level of urgency needs to go in fixing this structural productivity problem that we have,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n<p>                <!-- Post Tags --><\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A woman selling tomatoes in a market in Dedza, Malawi, along the border with Mozambique. Former Director of Operations at ESOKO, Nana Okyir Baidoo, says while short terms fixes are currently necessary to address food inflation in the country, government should be more interested in long term solutions. According to him, the current food inflation [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1189376,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[187],"tags":[8539,9574,1552,1090,2259,274,5665,2177],"class_list":["post-1189372","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-politics","tag-baidoo","tag-dumsor","tag-food","tag-government","tag-invest","tag-nana","tag-okyir","tag-security"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1189372","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1189372"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1189372\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1189372"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1189372"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1189372"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}