A project to improve the post-harvest quality and packaging of rice, sorghum, millet and cassava to enhance their marketability in the West African sub-region has been launched in Accra.
The two-year project seeks to promote processing technologies of these cereals to ensure food security and increase farmers and processors’ incomes within the sub-region.
The Deputy Director-General of the Centre for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), Mrs Mamaa Entsua-Mensah, who launched the project, said it was in line with an agreement signed between the Central African Council for Agricultural Research and Development (WECARD) and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID).
She said it was part of the framework of the Emergency Global Food Security Initiative to help address the current food crisis and the hiking of food prices globally.
The participating countries include Senegal, Mali, Liberia, Ghana and Nigeria. The countries have been grouped according to what they produce, and for rice, we have Senegal, Mali, Niger, Burkina Faso and Nigeria; for sorghum and millet, Ghana and Nigeria; while Benin and Togo are for cassava.
Mrs Entsua-Mensah said food crops such as rice, millet, sorghum and cassava were very important in the sub-region and, therefore, called for government’s intervention in the promotion of investments to enhance marketing opportunities for cassava and its products, since they had the potential to significantly reduce poverty in the sub-region.
In a speech read on his behalf, the acting Director-General of the Food Research Institute, Dr Paa Nii Johnson, said the institute had developed the capacity to process, preserve and utilise crops in the country.
He added that improved rice post-production and marketing systems had been developed to enhance rural livelihoods in northern Ghana.
Dr Johnson said the institute had also sourced funds to set up cassava processing plants for the production of various cassava commodities to help enhance the scale of cassava processing and reduce post-harvest losses.
The project also include the identification and selection of beneficiaries for training in high quality cassava flour processing technologies.
There will also be a rice project, which includes analysing existing rice post-harvest technologies.
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