Editorial (The Daily Searchlight, Monday, March 21st, 2022)
The prices of goods and services are shooting through the roof. The price of petrol has gone past GHc40.00 a gallon, and there are indications that it would rise even further.
The women who visit the markets are complaining. They insist that they may very soon not be in a position to feed their families adequately, because prices are rising far higher than what they receive as allowances to feed their families.
In all this, the Daily Searchlight believes that Ghanaians would not have felt the rise in prices so harshly, if we had seriously addressed issues of agriculture and transportation over the past few years.
Indeed, Ghana happens to have the privilege of lying on the equator in the tropics, with year round water and sunshine. That being the case, if the nation had adopted serious farming practices, it would long ago have achieved self-sustainability in food production and consequential low prices of basic foodstuffs.
If we had managed to accompany that with a transportation system, specifically railway, that was able to bring in goods at low prices from the hinterlands, Ghanaians would not be feeling the pinch of high prices as harshly as they are currently feeling them.
It can be gainsaid that Ghana’s situation is better than some of its African neighbours. That said, the situation can still be better, and it is never too late.
We believe that the government would achieve a measure of progress if it can, even now, concentrate on better production methods in agriculture and transportation, so that in the short, medium and long term, we can see a deceleration in the rate at which the prices of goods and services are rising.
(The Daily Searchlight appears every day on the newsstands and for sale 24 hours every day and all week on www.ghananewsstand.com. Visit www.ghananewsstand.com for a wide variety of newspapers published in Ghana and from across the world.)
