The Member of Parliament for the Sissala East Constituency in the Upper West Region, Mohammed Issah Bataglia has suggested that the operations of the National Food Buffer-stock Company are decentralized to serve farmers directly.
According to the legislator, the current structure of the operations of the Buffer-stock company is not helpful in ensuring their efficiency. “If you look at how the buffer-stock operates, it does help them reach out to more farmers. I think government should resource them to operationalize the completed warehouses and those that are not completed should also be completed”, he stated.
He added that, “if buffers-stock can open offices in the communities it will help them reach out to more farmers. They should consider getting aggregators in the communities so that suppliers will not have to travel all the way to the farming communities to buy their items”.
Hon. Bataglia whose area is one of the leading maize-producing communities in the country believes decentralizing the buffer-stock’s operations will go a long way to help ease the burden of farmers as they will have easy access to them.
Inputs support
The member of parliament disclosed that he has been in talks with the Ministry of Food and Agriculture to find a way of subsidizing inputs like fertilizer for farmers in his area. He said, “I personally had a discussion with the Agric minister and made it clear that if you look at the Sissala East, we do not just deal with peasant farmers, we have a lot of young people who are more into commercial farming now so practically it is not feasible to supply free fertilizer to all of them.
So we have appealed to the government to consider subsidizing so that many of them will benefit from the intervention”, he disclosed.
Source: tolonradio.com
