Sale of land to foreigners endangers country’s food security - Okudzeto
A renowned legal practitioner, Mr Samuel Okudzeto, has warned that large tracts of land being sold to foreigners, including Chinese, for agriculture can endanger the country’s food security.
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According to him, such ventures may end up producing food for the Chinese market instead of Ghana.
“We should be careful not to allow foreigners to come and acquire our lands and produce food that they will take away. We must feed our people. We have enough fertile lands to produce enough to feed ourselves,” he said at a round-table discussion in Accra.
While admitting to the Daily Graphic that he could not point to areas where foreigners were acquiring lands, he said the situation existed.
Mr Okudzeto said that during a discussion organised by the Institute of Economic Affairs on the theme: “Africa through the eyes of BRICS.”
The discussion provided the platform for the participants to explore the threats and opportunities African economies faced when dealing with the BRICS group of emerging economies (made up of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa).
Chinese immigrants
Mr Okudzeto also drew attention to the increasing presence of Chinese immigrants in mining areas where the country’s water resources are being polluted but little action had been taken by the previous government probably because of the line of credit it sought from the Chinese government.
In a presentation on the theme, an Associate Professor of International Relations of the Getulio Vargas Foundation of Brazil, Prof. Oliver Stuenkuel, said the BRICS countries were facing difficulties as “Brazil, South Africa and Russia are currently growing lower than during the first decade of the century”.
He, however, observed that taken as a whole, the BRICS grouping was still growing at rates above those in the European Union and the United States.
He, however, said although China’s growth rates were on the decline, its contribution to the world economy was still impressive.
Come together
Prof. Stuenkuel urged African governments to regionally come together to articulate their wants and needs vis-à-vis BRICS projects.
He said the greatest challenge that most developing countries, including Ghana, faced was being able to reduce their dependency on China and manage their growing relationship with that country in a way that it benefited the national strategy of each country.
“For China, Africa and Latin America have become extremely important for long-term planning and Chinese Strategy because of commodity and food, even more important than Europe for example, as the Chinese are capable of developing their own technology,” he said.
Technology transfer
An Adjunct Fellow of the IEA, Dr Eric Osei-Assibey, observed that there had been little benefit in the form of technology transfer for African countries, including Ghana, as the Chinese contractors brought their own employees to execute contracts.
Dr Osei-Assibey, who is also a Senior Economist of the University of Ghana, observed that Africa needed a strategy to deal with the development challenges that came with engaging with China.
