Food For All: Cultivating A Sustainable Food Future

Life is hard. In this era where prices of goods and services have shot up to the sky, it’s no news that everyone is complaining. To make things worse, even foodstuffs have become way more expensive than normal. Is it not enough that we are suffering? Now we can’t even eat well.

Looking at the Ghanaian market now, tomato is the new gold in town. Tell me why you only get about 6 tomatoes with two dollars. About two years ago, you could get a lot of tomatoes for just a dollar. This should tell you that things have really changed.

For people like myself who prioritise eating fresh meals, we surely feel the effect of how costly things are these days. I eat all my meals with vegetables and words can’t explain how much I exclaim anytime I go grocery shopping. It’s from eih to hmm to ah! At the end of the day, I sit down and rethink if I should go back to fast food cos that saves me a lot of money as compared to home cooked meals.

Most of us grew up to think that farming is actually for the poor. I grew up in the city and so I knew nothing about farming until I moved away from home. Believe me , farming has to be the most paying job ever because there’s no day human beings will just wake up and say they have decided to stop eating. We eat everyday and that means profit for farmers in one way or the other.

In as much as I would like to think that farmers make a lot of money, that isn’t the issue we face today. After every farming season, most farmers report to have lost so much and they end up with little to no profit from all their hard work. Most farmers today experience post harvest losses and this goes a long way to affecting the food supply chain.

Most of us don’t even know the difference between organic produce and genetically modified ones and even if we did, I bet we wouldn’t be able to afford the fresh produce as it is very costly. Majority of us now have even moved away from fresh foods to canned ones which are easy to access.

Looking into the future, I sense doom in the food and agricultural sector and the only way to put things right on track is to revisit our past and work on coming up with new techniques to tackle the food production and distribution issues we are facing today.

At this moment, I think it would be very helpful if we developed new farming techniques which would help our farmers produce more fresh produce. Taking a look at vertical farming, there’s a lot of potential in there as farmers can actually grow two times what they grow using the traditional farming methods. It is important that farmers are provided with sustainable solutions for farming in todays world.

In Ghana, farmers do not have access to appropriate technology to aid with their work. Just this morning, I passed by a farmer who was building a fence around his farm using dry sticks. I bet this would take him several hours to complete as his goal is to cover about two acres of land. If this farmer had access to appropriate technology, this would have been done in less than an hour and he would have more time to focus on planting his seed and other stuff.

Did you also know that about one third of food produced globally ends up getting wasted. This is to us the consumers, food is important and so we must treat it as such. You wouldn’t want to wake up one day to famine. And so, let’s make it point to avoid wasting food and prioritise good food safety practices.

The future of food and agriculture depends on the choices we make today as individuals. Let us make it a point to invest in sustainable practices, support innovation, and address social justice issues, it is only then we can create a food system that nourishes everyone for generations to come.

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all images belong to me.

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