Major Courage Quashigah (rtd), Minister of Food and Agriculture, said on Friday that the country would not experience the shortage of the major food staples this year.

The ministry has so far purchased about 10,000 tonnes of maize for storage as part of the strategic food reserve programme, Major Quashigah said at the launching of the ministry's pilot food security programme for Ashanti in Kumasi where about 36,000 mini bags of maize and 8,000 bags of rice had already been stored.

The Minister noted that the current situation where the country import food to the tune of 500 million dollars annually was unacceptable and the government was therefore, determined to remedy this situation.

Major Quashigah said on assumption of office, he pledged to reduce the country's food import bill on rice by 30 percent by the year 2004 and therefore, started with the rehabilitation of all irrigation projects in the country and the result was that for the first time in several years, farmers at the Afife irrigation project cropped all the 800 acres of land and were now asking for the cropping of more land.

There is no doubt that this country's development depended on agriculture, he said, pointing out that if Ghanaians patronised local rice they would not only be saving the country the much needed foreign exchange, but would be creating jobs for a lot of people who will be involved in the rice industry.

The Agriculture Minister therefore, appealed to Ghanaians to patronise the locally produced rice, explaining that though it may not compare favourably with the imported rice, it was much more nutritious than the imported rice some of which had been stored for more than 10 years.

Major Quashigah said the situation in the country was not one of the hopelessness but that it looked like people had abandoned the country and instead were depending on the importation of everything and gave the assurance that the NPP government was determined to remedy the situation.

Mr S.K. Boafo, Ashanti Regional Minister, advised Ghanaians to change their tastes in favour of locally produced food items, saying that this must start from the homes, schools, hospitals and other institutions.

He said if Ghanaians did not change their tastes for the consumption of imported food items, the stocking of the locally produced items being embarked upon would be a waste of resources and energy.

Mr Boafo said the government had noted with concern the predicted poor food supply situation in the country due to the vagaries of the weather experienced in some food producing areas of the country.

"I believe it is this anticipated gloomy situation of food supply regime that had pushed the Ministry of Food and Agriculture to put in place this medium term food security plans for the country."

The Regional Minister noted that with the launching of this medium term pilot food security programme therefore, the Ministry of Food and Agriculture was on its way to attain long term food sufficiency which the NPP government promised the people.

Mr Chris Bakaweri of Technoserve, said his organisation had assisted a selected number of small and medium businesses across the country to leverage over 4.5 billion cedis to stockpile over 3,500 tons of rice, maize and cowpea to address food security in the country.

Earlier, Major Quashigah had inspected four out of eight silos belonging to the Ghana Food Distribution Corporation (GFDC), which had broken down over the past 36 years for the storage of maize.

Mr E. Kodzo Dumenu, Project Co-ordinator of the Ministry of Food and Agriculture and the Small-Scale Holder Input Supply and Marketing Project (SCIMP), told the Minister that if the four rehabilitated silos proved successful the remaining four would also be rehabilitated, adding that the four rehabilitated silos could hold 2,400 tonnes of maize.