The Ministry of Food and Agriculture has denied reports that there is shortage of cassava on the market.
Alhough cassava is one of the common crops in Ghana and easiest to cultivate, it is currently expensive and hard to come by.
There is shortage of cassava reported across the country, prompting a sharp rise in the price of the commodity.
Its price on the market has doubled over the past few years. In 2013, a bag of 250 kilogram of cassava was sold at GH¢25, GH¢50 in 2014, GH¢100 in 2015 and GH¢200 in early 2016.
But amidst such reports, the Ministry still believes there is an abundance of the crop on the Ghanaian market.
The USAID technical Advisor to the Ministry, Kwesi Korboe has said the rise in the prices of the staple commodity is because of the seasonal nature of the crop and the delay of the onset of rains this year.
“We generally have enough cassava planted way above what we need for households and industrial consumption.Cassava is manually harvested; there are only few places that it is not manually harvested and it is manually harvested because we haven’t come out with the most easy way of harvesting it worldwide. What happens is that our rainy season comes in the second quarter which is April, so in the first quarter the ground is very hard. What that means is that the cost of harvesting cassava becomes expensive and tedious.” Kwesi Korboe told Accra-based Citi FM.
<<Print>>