Ten major rice millers have agreed to buy locally grown rice for processing at 60 percent capacity which translates to 300,000 metric tonnes annually, representing over 23 million bags of home-grown rice.
This emerged at a meeting spearheaded by Ghana’s lead campaigner for local rice consumption, Samuel Attah-Mensah with the John Agyekum Kufuor (JAK) Foundation and some 15 local rice millers.
Speaking to Citi News, the Head of Policy at the JAK Foundation, Nana Ama Oppong Dua, said the next phase of the discussions is a meeting with financial institutions to support this course.
“What we realized is that for the 300,000 metric tonnes that can be done by these 10 [millers] we need just about 125,000 hectares of land to be able to do that. From the statistics we have from the Ministry, we have 300,000 hectares of land under cultivation. So it means that even what we’ve planted is much more than the capacity of these 10 mills here.”
“So we are hoping that the other mills will even come on board to be able to do that. What we have also done is that we’ve even used very conservative estimates. What we are using for this 300,000 metric tonnes is 60 percent capacity of production so if we scale up to 100%, then we will be able to produce much more,” she noted.
The Buy-made-in-Ghana rice campaign led by Citi FM/TV’s CEO Samuel Attah-Mensah has so far attracted a lot of support from various groups and individuals.
One of the many is agricultural commodity trading company, Wienco Ghana Limited who has pledged to be at the forefront of attempts to purchase all excess rice harvests.
Speaking during a meeting with local rice farmers at Avalavi Weta in the Volta Region on Tuesday, the Deputy Minister of Food and Agriculture, Kennedy Osei Nyarko, said Wienco had already committed to buying all excess rice following cries for help from farmers.
As another avenue of support, the Ministry of Food and Agriculture has also been meeting with a number of major rice importers to urge them to support rice production in the country.
Mr. Nyarko noted that the government has communicated plans to ban the importation of rice by 2022 to boost local rice production.