Tuesday, October 12, 2010

BAGRE CANALS AND FATE OF TOMATO FARMERS (OCT 12, 2010)

THE name Bagre does not sound pleasant to the ears of many of our brothers and sisters in the northern part of the country, and for good reasons. Anytime the spill gates of the dam bearing that name are opened in Burkina Faso, our northern neighbour, the excess water finds its level on the farms and in the homes of people in the three northern regions.
This year, as in previous years, a few souls have been lost, some homes destroyed and many food crops destroyed as a result of the opening of the Bagre Dam. Since this has become an annual affair, people have started raising questions on why, instead of waiting for the floods to come and swallow us and our crops on a yearly basis, we can’t exploit the possibility of transforming a seemingly natural calamity into a fortune by harnessing the excess water from the dam for productive use in the agricultural sector.
For a country that relies, in the main, on rain-fed agricultural production, it does not make sense seeing this large volume of water going waste and causing destruction in the process when its venom could be subdued and its energy utilised for productive use to the advantage of the people who otherwise have been victims of its devastating effects.
It was, therefore, welcoming news when Dr Charles Jebuni, a technical adviser to the Savannah Accelerated Development Authority (SADA), broke the news that the body purposely established to spearhead accelerated development of the north had decided to construct canals and reservoirs to collect and store the excess water for irrigation purposes.
Dr Jebuni does not need to offer reasons for such a bold and pragmatic initiative, since the benefits of the venture, if carried out to the full, are clear on the wall.
First, the perennial flooding will become a thing of the past or at least it will be reduced considerably. Second, as indicated by Dr Jebuni, the Bagre Dam water will enhance irrigation farming in the affected areas, mostly in the Upper East and Upper West regions
Some of us have always held the view that excessive reliance on the weather for agricultural production is not the best for a country so abundantly endowed with water resources for domestic, commercial, agricultural and industrial use. It is very sad seeing vast tracts of land in the Afram and Accra plains, all drained by the Volta Lake lying waste, while the country continues to rely on imported rice and other food items.
Elsewhere, nations have gone to war or are feuding seriously over limited water resources. Just a few months ago, countries in the Nile Basin met to draft a new law to replace the colonial one supervised by Great Britain which gave Egypt greater control over the waters of the River Nile.
Thankfully, we have escaped that tragedy, at least for now. Unfortunately, we have not been able to harness the water resources of our rivers for serious agricultural production. We still rely heavily on the rains for farming, with its serious side effects.
Burkina Faso has shown the way by undertaking serious irrigation farming which has turned that Sahelian country into a huge exporter of fruits and vegetables. What are we doing here? I know the Ministry of Agriculture has in its books plans to go into extensive irrigation farming. But, for now, we are waiting for the day that this will happen and until then, we are still at the mercy of the weather.
We hope that when the SADA initiative becomes a reality, it will open the way for more of such projects in other parts of the country.
And that brings us to other major obstacles which are undermining agricultural production and consequently impoverishing farmers in the country.
Apart from the poor road network in most of our food-growing areas, the problems of poor storage and preservation of farm produce have conspired to make our farmers poor, notwithstanding the efforts and resources they put into farming.
A few weeks ago, tomato farmers all over the country, especially those around Ada and the southern parts of the Volta Region, raised their voices in anguish, crying for market for their produce. Out of frustration, some of them left baskets of tomatoes by the roadside to rot. It is as if we do not know that after planting, there is bound to be a period of harvesting for which we should prepare accordingly.
Every year, tomatoes, oranges, mangoes and other farm produce go waste during the harvest season, while hard foreign exchange is spent importing fruit juices and tomato puree of questionable quality into the country, at the expense of local production. We cannot continue to treat our farmers with such disdain.
We cannot continue to make noise about our dedication to developing agriculture to attain self-sufficiency in food production and create jobs for the rural youth if we cannot store and preserve what we produce against the rainy day and as a means of adding value to local production.
So what happens if SADA should succeed in its objective of harnessing water from the Bagre Dam for irrigation farming and there is a bumper harvest? Are we going to watch the efforts and investments of the farmers rot away? Or are we going to pursue a more aggressive policy of creating facilities for storing and preserving what we produce, just as other countries whose goods have flooded our markets do?
We do not need complex factories and canneries for food preservation. A few cottage processing plants here and there will do the trick and even though individual initiatives are necessary, an official position or the government’s policy in this matter will greatly meet the farmers halfway and give impetus to local production in the long run.
The Americans say: “We eat what we can, and CAN what we CAN’T.” It is the food which other countries cannot consume locally that find its way onto our markets as canned products. What is going to be our marching song as we launch ourselves onto the ambitious path of attaining a middle-income status by the year 2015?
fokofi@yahoo.co.uk
kofiakordor.blogspot.com

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