Our growing appetite for foreign goods and foods, which are also available in the country, has cost us fortunes since we began developing our own industries under Kwame Nkrumah and successive leaders.
From US perfumed rice and edible oil that come in through relief organisations, through middle class acquired habits, to unpatriotic business cultures which a section of the GUTA community has inflicted upon the public and consumers, our collective inability to see far and use industrialisation to solve basic food security problems has caught up with us.
Today, it is no longer US rice and edible oil, but all forms of commodities, including rice, processed tomato, tooth pick and edible oil, from our contemporaries in East Asia.
Unfortunate
The irony in the situation is that those in political authority, who should be engineering, implementing and monitoring policy to develop the rice industry, are guiltiest when it comes to consumption of foreign rice, edible oils and tomato paste.
Over half a century, caught in a web of economic depression, the reality is here with us, though we had seen it coming all along, and had even been expressing concern about staggering sums of money that go into importing such food commodities.
The situation becomes even worse when it is considered against the fact that most of these imported items come in through our neighbouring countries, with the job creation, economic and development benefits inuring to their benefit.
Trade liberalisation
We forget that at the time our development partners advised that we open up our economy, as part of efforts to attract investment, it still took massive injection of very scarce foreign exchange under the rigid PNDC administration to import poultry, rice, sardine and tomato paste, all of which still come in today branded in over twenty labels.
Yet, we had the Tema Food Complex as a state enterprise which was doing great, except that PDC and CDR politics and ‘kokonsa’, as well as naked sycophancy and cronyism, would be combining to run it down.
Of course, that is not to say that trade per se is bad or anti-development. indeed, the opinion of the Daily Statesman is that we overdid it to the point that we extended that unholy appetite to importing tooth picks, bolts and nuts and screws as well as handkerchiefs and scarves, all of which we could conveniently produce here through our state textile factories. And all of that inflicted huge cost on our central bank, while we oiled the economies of other countries.
Realities
Again, that is not to say we haven’t moved forward. The worry here is that the garment industry has collapsed, in spite of the presence of fashion designers whose peccadillo is that they have little space for ordinary citizens.
And that unfortunate situation compels import of used clothing by actors in a sector that has so overgrown that we may not be able to take any action to check it.
The reality is that, in the midst of the crushing socio-economic crisis facing the country, we must not allow our foreign appetites to dictate the collective destiny, and fight for recovery.
We welcome the refreshing news that the ban on rice export in East Asia has led to increased patronage of locally produced rice. And we want to encourage rice producers and millers to look inwards, and explore areas of innovation, in sustaining the benefits that would be coming their way as a result of the ban.
Thankfully, too, we are beginning to see food and beverage processing ventures popping up across Ghana’s industrial belts. They need no one to tell them to explore opportunities in this global crisis to expand and leverage markets, as they create jobs for the teeming population.
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