Sunyani Municipal best farmer worries about bad roads

Opanin Yaw Osei, Sunyani Municipal best farmer on Friday expressed worry about the poor conditions of road networks to farming communities within the Municipality. He observed that almost all roads leading to farm gates in many of the communities in the Municipality were in bad shape, and needed to be rehabilitated. Speaking to the Ghana News Agency (GNA) in an interview after the Municipal celebration of the 29th Farmers' Day at Abesim, near Sunyani, Opanin Osei, a farmer at Yaw Sae, said bad roads were major hindrances to the economic activities of farmers. He said because of the bad state of the roads, many drivers failed to ply them during rainy season, and as such, foodstuffs were left rotten in farms during bumper harvests. Opanin Osei said the Yaw Sae community and other settlement villages had made persistent appeals to the Sunyani Municipal Assembly through the assembly member in the area for rehabilitation works on the roads, but to no avail. He, therefore, appealed to the Local Government Ministry, to intervene and order the Municipal Assembly to rehabilitate some of the roads. Opanin Osei was worried that because there were no standardized prices for maize, cassava and plantain, traders bought the items at cheaper prices, transport and sell them in town at exorbitant prices. He said many of the farmers felt cheated but because of lack of storage facilities, they had no other option than to sell the produce as the crops would get rotten. Mr Osei said with the rehabilitation of the roads to the farming communities, most of the farmers would be encouraged to go into large scale farming to enhance food security. He said statistics showed that food production in the Municipality had gown down drastically for some time now, because some incentives which were being provided to deserving farmers for some years back had stopped coming.. Some of these incentives, Opanin Osei mentioned, were the mass cocoa spraying exercise, distribution of Wellington boots, fertilizers and cutlasses at subsidized prices.