Don’t blame imminent collapse of factories on only soya bean exports
Unemployment is one of the troubling issues in the country today and so to hear that two whole factories are likely to close down should be a great concern to the public.
Our lead story today has it that Vester Oil Mills Limited in Kuntenase-Deduako in the Bosomtwe District and Thomas W. Bello Enterprise, operating in the Asokwa Municipality, both in the Ashanti Region, as a first step, have been forced to drastically reduce their workforce.
The two major soya bean-processing plants are facing possible closure due to severe shortages of their primary raw material, occasioned by huge exports despite government restrictions.
The inability of the factories to produce enough is said to have created a ripple effect across multiple sectors, particularly poultry, aquaculture, and livestock industries that depend heavily on soya bean products for animal feed.
It would be recalled that in the second half of August, this year, the government put a ban on export of such grains as maize or corn, rice and soya beans.
The ban, principally meant as a response to an ongoing dry spell severely affecting the northern regions of the country, had been envisaged to cause food shortages in the regions and, for that matter, the entire nation.
The affected regions are responsible for about 62 per cent of the country’s grain production and so shortages of grains there spell doom for the whole country as most of the foods consumed in the country are made from grains.
Envisaging the effect of the ban on commercial farmers in particular, the government provided a window of opportunity by asking farmers with stocks and interested in selling them to contact district directors across the country, district aggregators, or the directorate of crops under the Ministry of Agriculture to facilitate such sales.
The government categorically stated that the move was meant to ensure that farmers would not suffer adversely as a result of this ban.
The ban was described as a measure essential to ensuring the availability of these critical crops on the domestic market.
That is to say that the ban was a move for the greater good, yet some groups raised issues against it for various reasons.
For instance, the Soya Value Chain Association of Ghana described the ban as “uncalled for”, as there was already a restriction on grain export and that a complete ban would go against the financial interest of many poor farmers.
It explained that the ban was going to give an upper hand to local grain buyers who would dictate prices of the affected grains.
On their part, members of the Ghana Soybean Farmers and Aggregators Association called for withdrawal of the ban, questioning what had become of the buffer stock initiative meant to accumulate grains in the peak season, store and release them during the lean season.
It is clear that the imminent collapse of the two soya bean-processing factories in the Ashanti Region is not merely due to the export of soya beans in spite of the ban but the failure of the state apparatus to store the grains and ensure good prices for grain producers, who produce at a cost, which they fail to even retrieve when their products are sold locally.
The government must solve these problems and save the factories from collapse and save jobs thereby.