Human activities threatening food security in Shama – Participants

Participants at a day’s stakeholder validation workshop have expressed concern over the prevalence of sand and clay mining, and quarry activities that are negatively affecting farming activities in the Shama District of the Western Region.

According to them, those human activities were a major concern, which aggravated climate change issues, and thus, threatened food security in the area.

They expressed these sentiments when the Friends of the Nation (FoN), a socio-environmental advocacy non-governmental organisation (NGO), organised a validation workshop on a gender-based food shed assessments within the context of climate change and ecosystem management in Shama.

It brought together representatives from Peasant Farmers Association of Ghana (PFAG), farmer groups, students, media, traditional authorities, and heads of departments within the Shama District.

The engagement formed part of the FoN’s Climate Media Collaborative for Economic Justice and Community Rights Project being supported by Oxfam and Ford Foundation, to seek stakeholders’ inputs to finalise the report on the assessment.

The Project sought to build communities’ climate resilience by creating awareness on the devastating impact of climate change and how stakeholders could collectively mitigate it.

Mr Bismark Owusu Nortey, the Executive Director of PFAG, and consultant to the project, who presented findings from the assessment said sand mining activities affected the availability of fertile lands for food crop production and contributed to high level of waterlogging.

This is because, “sand is mined along the Pra river, forcing farmers along the banks to migrate and subsequently lose such fertile lands as well as access water for irrigation.”

According to him the situation further exacerbated farmers’ plight where they incurred high cost in production by purchasing more farm inputs due to the poor quality of soils.

On the issue of quarrying, Mr Nortey indicated that the activity also posed dangers to farming activities in the district, adding that the practice had resulted in the reduction of the size of farmlands.

He said the research revealed that farmlands around quarrying sites had been abandoned due to the expansion of quarry operations in the area.

He noted that all these activities were causal agents of climate change issues, and that stakeholders must chart a common path towards addressing its possible threats to food security in the long run.

Mr Nortey recommended that that authorities of the Shama District Assembly should work with other stakeholders to integrate sustainable farming practices for farmers, develop early warning systems and other adaptation strategies to build farmers’ resilience against climate change issues.

He said there was also the need for the Assembly to strictly enforce its regulations on land spatial management and develop effective guidelines to control deforestation and other land degradation practices in the district.

Mr Michael Nyan, the Shama District Director of the National Disaster Management Organisation (NADMO), urged land owners to desist from giving out their lands for mining and quarry purposes to help safeguard the lands from excessive degradation.

Madam Ruth Agyeiwaa Badu, Head of Physical Planning at the Shama District Assembly, encouraged the farmers to strengthen the advocacy against land degradation through their various associations to help preserve the forest from further destruction.

Mr William Augustine Dankyi, a Project Officer at FoN, said the impacts of climate change could be devastating, and that everyone had a responsibility to play to mitigate its effects on livelihoods.