Dr. Owusu Afriyie Akoto, the minister of food and agriculture, has attributed the current rise in food costs to the greed of market women.
As argued by Dr Akoto, most of the prices of foodstuffs being sold in the urban areas have been tripled by market women who are very greedy and insensitive.
Speaking at a town hall meeting, the NPP bigwig claimed that people would buy a basket of tomatoes for Ghc150 in the villages where they are planted before and later sell the same things at Ghc400 in the cities.
In his own words;
“The problem that we are facing about the high cost of food is nothing to do with the shortage of food in the markets. You go to the producing areas, you will see exactly what I am talking about, I am just coming back five weeks ago, there is plenty of stocks and maize not even for this year, this year’s harvest is yet to come, we are talking of leftover last year’s crops”,
“The issue is, you go and buy a basket of let’s say ¢150 of tomatoes, and then it comes to Kumasi and suddenly becomes ¢400, so there is some profiteering going on.”
Mr Akoto continued that, the Akufo Addo-led NPP government has made sure that Ghanaians have food in abundance because of the planting for food and jobs initiative.
Without Planting for Food and Jobs we’ll be going as hungry as our neighbours around West Africa who are now coming to Ghana as the bread basket to pick our surpluses to the point that we even had to limit it by saying we are temporary banning export of our produce to the neighbouring countries,” he said.
“Of course other west African countries are going hungry that’s why they’re coming to Ghana to pick our food. Our surpluses and you’ll just have to travel to Ejura and other places to see those days the number plates of trucks crisscrossing Ghana, picking up surpluses to feed their own countries.
“As far as Kano in Nigeria, they were coming here to buy our rice,”
