Despite the growing economic demand for organic produce in Ghana, the low quantity and quality of organic produce deny organic farmers the opportunity to benefit from this potential market to increase their incomes. This is as a result of the lack of a policy and guiding procedures on organic farming to facilitate the inclusion of organic farming in governement projects such as the Planting for Food and Jobs Programme (PFJ) and other government intervention policies in agriculture to gain backstopping and input supply supports to increase yield and quality. To ensure the establishment of a comprehensive policy on organic farming to facilitate the inclusion of organic farmers in government projects and also serve as a guiding procedure to ensure that organic farmers follow the appropraite farming methods to increase yields and improve quality to meet demand and increase their incomes in addition to securing the integrity of our environment.
Food Networks that has been promoted by Darsfield EarthCare & Farm-Tech Foundation, Food Sovereignty Ghana and Slow Food International in which Africa especially Ghana must take advantage to network and promote food network and food security through sustainable agriculture. The challenges in African food production are that government after government does not prioritize agriculture, they don’t implement better agricultural policies to better the lives of many and getting the rural members to be participants.
Some five decades ago, Ghana was importing tomato from Italy into the economy and this affected tomato production in Ghana and so it has been for other crops. The “Bad Agricultural Trade Policies” in Ghana has always promoted producing and marketing from other countries than Ghana’s produce. It is important for our children to know where the food we eat comes from and how it is grown. In most African schools, we used to have school farms for school children to pick interest in food production and agribusiness in general.
Food sovereignty promotes the adoption of sustainable farming technology that inclusively addresses food productivity and yields, mitigating climate change and increase incomes through agriculture. Africa must adopt innovative agricultural sustainable technologies that sustain our food security and better agriculture. Our government accepts any agricultural technology sold to them without better analytical field trials. Today, poor African farmers have access to GMO farming technology, Conventional technology but no access to Organic sustainable farming technology and if GMO farming technology was good why has Europe and Russian Federation rejected it. As you can see African governments would gamble with Agriculture than any sectors of the economy.
African government should establish permaculture development banks (a financial institution) to supports and promotes permaculture farming technology across Africa for jobs and wealth creations. In all this people must be giving a choice on the kind of food they would choose to eat.
For instance, in Russia when patients are sick and the patient visits the hospital for treatment, the Doctor put before the patients both organic drugs (natural herbs) and orthodox drugs (pharmaceutical). Here, the patients are made to choose what kind of treatment they would prefer.
The food we eat is supposed to nourish our body. It’s to heal the body and it’s to help the body in its normal physiological functioning. Have you imagined this, “what Africans grow, we don’t eat” We grow food to export but we import food to eat in Africa. Africa use 70% of her arable land to grow cocoa and coffee for export. So consumers must be giving the choice to make regarding food they want to eat.
Eco-cide is the bio-calibration or disdain for or disrespect to and pollution of live that makes the system not to support any life anymore, like air we breathe and water we drink. So in other words Eco-cide is total disruption of any life form disrespect and disdain for the bio-calibration which maintains the functional design purpose of all live and life system on the planets.
The many agro-ecological zones in Africa can guide us toward sustainable food systems. Agro-ecology is both science and a social response. For instance, in mitigating climate change and preventing in other word compounding drought and desertification that drives the Sahara desert further south every year. So our response as Africans is to build a great green wall across the continent to stop it.
What do you think? FAO asked an important question, we have not heard anyone or government provide us with the answer.
Are we ready to pay nature’s bill? Should we ignore nature’s bill, we would be faced with, loss of biodiversity. Increase water scarcity. Loss of wetlands and REMSAR sites. Loss of forest covers. Eroded land. Increase food prices. High Greenhouse gases (GHG) emission. Prevalence of pests and diseases in crops, livestock and humans. Yet, our people still shows disrespects to the environment.
So far the five top users of agrochemicals and fertilizers in the world and those intensively promoting both conventional and GMO technology to feed her population without considering the environment. The largest users of agrochemicals and fertilizers are China with two million pounds as compared to United States of America with a million pound. Argentina and France are running neck to neck race with seven hundred and fifty thousand pounds to seven hundred thousand pounds and Brazil coming fifth with five hundred thousand pounds.
Many people I have met are literates but eco- illiterates in the sense that they are not aware of damages they do to the environment by throwing plastic bags and bottles around. We hearing people some people say our lives are getting better whilst the ozone layer is getting depleting, we are losing our trees and fertile lands. We are also saying our land is not getting better but polluted and impoverished.
Everyone in Africa is looking at Western world as pacesetters in development, but the West are not destroying their lands and water bodies as its been done in Africa where there are wastes at every wrong places polluting our lands and health of humans. Our people are sitting on land of gold and diamond but we are becoming poorer and begging the world for second hands items to survive.
Africa has contributed to the world in terms of science, astronomy, agriculture, medicine and so on and so forth. However, corruption has been the bane of Africans development. Corruption goes beyond politics but immorality, disrespect and disdain for normality by citizens.
Africans has their technology for producing food to feed her people and sustain our environment.
In 1945 America company, such as Monsanto was producing chemical weapons, deadly poison gases and nerve agents for the United States forces. Then Americans were involved in Vietnam War. In 1965 Monsanto created Glyphosate because United States forces were losing the war to a nation using primitive weapons to fight them. Glyphosate was created to burn down every forests and grassy vegetation so that they could see Viet Cons to fight. Glyphosate was found to be useful in removing minerals from pipes. Then in 1969, Monsanto converted it to herbicide for killing unwanted crops and grasses.
Glyphosate is laced with Glycine an essential amino acid needed by the body for development and which makes it easier for crops to also absorb the chemicals in our food. Glycine is responsible for body elasticity, and Glycine in Glyphosate is to disrupt the proteins chains in our body, preventing normal functionality of elasticity in joints of body.
United States degenerated into Glyphosate in the late 1960s with hip and joint displacement in the body. Glyphosate destroys natural or normal Glycine formation in the body. United States leads in the world with terminal diseases or what we call “Hard Diseases”, Retro-genic diseases and disease complication. Disease complications resulting in the body killing its immune system, simple because of the food they eat which are phenotypically food, but instead poisoned food.
Vivid check on the life expectancy of the doctors in the United States of America, they are just as sick as the patients they treat and they equally die young. Several harmful compounds has found its way into our food, thereby impairing in the normal functioning of normal physiological body anatomy. Agrochemicals in our food are lethal and carcinogenic, its hampers hormone and destroys gene leading to gene disorders. Many agrochemicals are responsible for the Retro-genic diseases we are experiencing in our health centers.
Aftermath of the Second World War, the Korean War and Vietnam War, Monsanto thought of converting unused obsolete biological and nerve weaponries into peaceful use in 1969 and agriculture was where it could be utilized mostly.
As we become educated our diets are changing from African indigenous diets to Western diets. Creating Bt tolerant crop became possible with isolation of the soil bacteria and inoculated with the gene of which only successful bacterial are cloned, cultured and bred. Bt tolerant crops are now fully blown pesticide plants. When insects attacks and feed on Bt crops they die. If the whole plant is poisonous to every insects, do you know the implications when human and animals begin to consume Bt crops.
I have heard people asked, how does GMO farming pollute our environment? First of all GMO farming technology requires the heavy use of fertilizers and agrochemicals, thereby destroying our environment and killing other life forms. These agrochemicals and fertilizers even in conventional agriculture are systemic in action hence consumers of this food absorbs this harmful chemicals into their body. GMO crop grows and produces pollen which can be dispersed by wind, or carried by birds and insects to infect other crops. So GMO farms in Accra can affects farms at Bawku in Northern Ghana in no time. GMO cropping would wipe off our local indigenous seeds and making our seeds sterile over time hence putting our kitchen in someone’s mouth.
Some years ago in the United States of America, a Medical Doctor developed a cure for cancer using measles causative germs. The measles germs were manipulated to treat many who had cancer. But after three years of treating all those patients that had the measles germ cancer treatment, came down with new strains of measles which were 99% mobility without any treatment and cure insight resulting in 99% mortality. Gene manipulation has resulted in defective species and abnormal products; hence to restore our values, to restore our principle that connects us back to nature, we must avoid genetically engineered products in agriculture.
