Our Country's Looming Food Insecurity

Currently, I have some discussions with some of the indigenous people from my fatherhood town. One of them said, "Degrees without skills are not enough" I tried to help him explain further what that statement meant but he could not give any explanation. I did this to avoid any confusion that might arise from his assertion because others might not see the essence of formal education based on his comments. This incident happened because of the Volta River Authority's unannounced dam spillage destruction that has rendered people homeless. Today, I will reframe the guy's comment to "degrees without discerning is not enough".

Ghana has a robust education system initiated by our colonial masters and further re-engineered by our former president, Dr. Kwame Nkrumah and some past leadership. This reputation attracts enormous inter-Africa recognition with foreign students' enrollment statistics every year as well as non-Africa countries.

But the question is, how does this achievement translate into our real-life issues? Sadly, recently I came across comments on social media platforms regarding one of the appointees of the government, trying to rebuttal a demonstration against the governor of Bank of Ghana, that the bank does not produce food products nor generate profits to tackle the country's fluctuating inflation and currency depreciation. Such comments coming from such a higher level of Ghana's political office reduce the engagement of intellectual prowess in our steering systems.

Also proves our levels of lack of basic knowledge of the economic and financial implications of governing structures and the evidence is obvious for putting such a character in this formidable position.

My main concern is very soon, our food security architecture will be in very big hurdle, not necessarily that we do not have experts or workers on the field working. Apart from galamsey activities that have destroyed huge ecosystems and poisoned our food chain, are the current Akosomba Dam spillage which has inundated several smallholders' farms and their holdings.

This may take a year or more to recover from this devastation and become useful for reproduction. Another grave issue is the neglected policy formulation and implementation of smallholder farming and their produce. A similar incidence is what happened in our Cocoa sector but this one looks very neglectable to the central governments and the effects will soon be very dire, if early policy coordination among ministries is not recognized.

Some basic staple food produce is now being bought directly from the farmers by foreigners and processed into secondary products for export into their countries. This phenomenon is largely based on the values of rewards of selling to foreigners compared to local markets and affecting especially our cassava production which has turned our common "gari" known as "students' companion" into "students' necessary evil" or cassava dough has hit the roof in the market.

Also, our decentralized departments and agencies' funds allocated in the yearly budgets are not mostly released during the right seasons, especially the agricultural sector to work within the scope of conducive farming seasons and engage in proper demonstration or research, from the Ministry of Finance and Bank of Ghana.

The looming views of food insecurity that may likely hit us in the future, will worsen if the Bank of Ghana still maintain its scrapping on the quota that will cushion food commodities importers despite the cedis will depreciate more. Our education must contribute to the interests of our country's development, not individual pockets' bloating at the expense of the multitude, whether we had our study at Harvard, Cambridge or Ho Technical University, ingenuity is the beacon that brings difference in our lights to the world.