Government has been asked to invest in the building and expansion of modern and high technology storage facilities, to help improve the storage and shelf lifespan of food crops.
Mrs Faustina Okyere, a Food Technologist at the Crops Research Institute (CRI) of the Council for Industrial Research (CSIR), who made the call, said the limited number of food storage facilities, which were mostly sited in urban centres, made it impossible for common smallholder farmers to access and store their produce.
She said some of the existing storage facilities were not technologically advanced and poorly maintained and at times, left in unfavourable condition and infested with pests and diseases.
Other challenges were the smaller sizes of the storage facilities which were often unable to store higher tonnages of produce during a season.
Speaking to the Ghana News Agency (GNA) in an interview at Fumesua in the Ejisu Municipality, Mrs Okyere stressed the need for the state to partner with relevant stakeholders to construct modern warehouses and silos to help address post-harvest losses and storage deficits in Ghana.
She indicated that crop storage facilities should be closed and easily accessible to farmers.
They should also serve as packing points, where buyers would not have to travel to the farms to buy the crops.
Turning attention to fruits and vegetables, she pointed out that cold vans should be made available to pick the commodities from the farms to the cold storage house close to markets.
“The available facilities like the ones at Ejura, should be expanded and we introduce the cold storage system to increase the shelf-life of fruits and vegetables that are highly perishable.
We need to promote the use of hermetic bags for storing cereals and grains for over
two years,” she appealed.
The Assistant Research Scientist said Ghana, having a huge agrarian population, needed to train more farmers in simple post-harvest technologies to help them prolong the lifespan of their produce.
Harvested commodities were not to be mixed in terms of storage, she noted, explaining that “every commodity and its behaviour for instance, one cannot mix tomatoes which are highly perishable with beans or cowpea to cause cross contamination, and the farmer may end up losing everything”.
Mrs Okyere called for equal attention to be given to all crops, indicating that cocoa and other cereals and grains had preference in terms of storage than fruits and vegetables.
She said some farmers had adopted traditional ways of storage including storage in sacks, gallons, coating in cassava, and barns among others, but could be easily invaded by pests and diseases.
