Vice-President Bawumia
Vice-President Mahamudu Bawumia has emphasized the importance of a regional food storage system for the ECOWAS sub-region in order to ensure food security, peace and accelerated development for the millions of people in West Africa and beyond.
Speaking at the virtual international conference on the West African Food Security Storage System in Accra, Dr Bawumia said although individual countries are making efforts towards ensuring local food security, a concerted, collective effort is important to ensure security for all.
“At a time when the global community and, indeed, Africa is reeling from the continuous threat and ravaging effects of the Covid-19 pandemic, this meeting is timely, and inspires great hope,” he stressed.
“As we all know, the COVID-19 pandemic has exposed the vulnerabilities of our food systems and our agriculture sectors in general.
“In the last seven years, statistics suggest that people facing food insecurity in the sub-region have exploded from two million to 27 million as at the end of our last cropping season. This is unacceptable, especially when agriculture offers the best hope of liberating our economies from the chronic malaise that has characterised them over the years,” he added.
Action required
Reminding the meeting, which was attended by Ministers of Agriculture of the 15-member states, Vice-President Bawumia said the time to act collectively is now.
“We all know that our countries are endowed with virtually all the resources needed to propel economic development, with agriculture as the major driving force. We have arable land, human resource, water bodies, varieties of food crops and a relatively favourable climate condition. We therefore have no excuses,” he said.
The meeting, he added, was a call to action that presents an opportunity for sharing country experiences, knowledge and generating consensus on the way forward to building strategic stock reserves in the sub region.
Insisting that ECOWAS communities are endowed with strong linkages, he pointed out that there was the need for building synergies in common areas of clear comparative advantage.
“We need stronger integration of our markets as promoted in the ECOWAS protocol to build the necessary resilience of our economies,” he stated, commending the community for the plan to build a strategic food storage system for the sub region in addressing the dire situation of emerging hunger facing citizens in ECOWAS countries.
He stated, however, that this laudable objective would require finance.
It was on that score that Dr Bawumia expressed appreciation to the donor community without whose support the modest achievements made in our various countries may not have been possible. The donor communities include the European Union, French Development Agency, Spanish Agency for International Development Cooperation (AECID), International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), World Bank, Arab Bank for Economic Development in Africa (BADEA), United States Agency for International Development (USAID), Swiss Development Cooperation and the German Development Cooperation,
According to the Vice-President, the lessons of COVID-19 are too strong to ignore. The way forward, he added, is to be more forward-looking in our planning to deliver solutions to the problems that confront our people.
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