Set standards for fruits and vegetables - Prof. Ayum Teye
The Vice-Chancellor of the University for Development Studies (UDS), Professor Gabriel Ayum-Teye, has called on the Ghana Standards Authority (GSA) and the Food and Drugs Authority (FDA) to collaborate with the scientific community and establish an agency to certify fruits and vegetables produced in the country.
Advertisement
He said because fruits and vegetables produced in Ghana were not certified, there was no controlling body and many supermarkets and shops had had to import fruits that had local substitutes from abroad.
He expressed worry that locally produced fruits and vegetables such as mangoes, bananas and oranges could not be sold in supermarkets in Ghana because of the lack of certification.
Workshop
Prof. Ayum-Teye was speaking at a day’s workshop on social implementation and upscaling of ‘Ghana Model’, targeted at enhancing resilience of fruits and vegetables in semi-arid Ghana.
The workshop was held in Tamale and organised by Climate and Ecosystem Change Adaptation and Resilience (CECAR-Africa), in collaboration with Kazuhiko Takeuchi Centre for Sustainability and Resilience (KTCSR) of the UDS.
The workshop was attended by environmental scientists, academics, civil society organisations, farmers, public officials and members from the international community.
Agency
Prof. Ayum-Teye, said the absence of a supervisory authority to certify fruits and vegetables produced in Ghana discouraged many farmers from going into large-scale cultivation of fruit crops.
He said when there was a supervisory body in place, it would boost the morale of Ghanaian farmers to go into the cultivation of fruit crops on a large scale and that would in turn reduce wastage.
He charged the participants in the workshop to continuously research into issues that could help ensure food security in semi-arid areas of the country.
Support
The project leader who is also a Director at the Integrated Research Systems for Sustainability Science at the University of Tokyo, Japan, Prof.Kazuhiko Takeuchi, said it was necessary to communicate information on approaches to resilience on climate change to people in semi-arid areas, particularly farmers, to enable them to adapt to climate-resilient methods of farming.
For her part, a representative of the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA), Ms Sayuri Shimotani, said the workshop provided evidence-based models that were shared and discussed and the results were expected to be mainstreamed into climate change policy formulation and implementation.
She expressed the hope that the findings from the workshop would accelerate the continuous sharing of information and experiences among all project researchers and policy makers even after the end of the project.
The Japanese Ambassador to Ghana, Mr Kaoru Yoshimura, said the government of Japan would continue to support the efforts of the government of Ghana in tackling the issue of climate change and protection of the environment in order to ensure food security.