Agriculture Professor cries for standards and grades in Ghanaian Agriculture

foodstuffA lecturer at KNUST’s Faculty of Agriculture is appalled that Ghana still lacks clearly defined standards and grades in her agriculture.

Prof. Simon Cudjoe Fialor in an interview with rawgist.com stated emphatically that “as long as standards are missing in our system, we are joking”.

He lamented how market women use size to determine prices and how people taste foodstuffs such as gari before determining if they want to buy or not. “The only way to find if gari is good for u, is to take a sample and put on your tongue to see if it appeals to your palate. That’s not good enough the gari should be sealed”, he stated.

Currently, tins of various products are used to measure foodstuff in the market. Truckloads of cassava are measured in “poles” a measuring standard that is not clearly defined and has been the recipe for confusion in many agro transactions between farmers and market women.

Prof. Fialor believes Agricultural technocrats and institutions have not been innovative enough and the setting of standards has been left to the market women who are largely illiterate and lack the expertise.

“The bottomline is, there is no money but some of these things don’t require money to begin, they just require putting the best foot forward and then finding the money to support it later”, Prof. Fialor explained.

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2 Comments

  1. It’s true, and a fact. Standardization is key.But editor needs to step up
    “The only way to find if gari is good for u, is to take a sample and put on your tongue to see if it appeals to your palate. That’s not good enough the gari should be sealed” –

    The use of short hand in the above quote is not the best.

  2. Grades and standards; the right way to go in the Ghanaian market.
    It’s about time we stopped using these tasting and eye-gauging tactics as a standard of measure.

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