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Gambia News : Food rights campaigner urges Gambia gov’t to invest more in agriculture
A food rights campaigner on Friday called for The Gambia to meet the
Maputo target by investing ten percent of the national budget on
agriculture if it wants to avoid a re-occurrence of the food crisis
that hit the country in 2008.
The Food Rights
Manager for Action Aid -The Gambia Chapter, Buba Khan told journalists
at his office in Kanifing (about 11km from Banjul) that the heads of
state of the African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) countries, had at a
meeting held in Maputo in Mozambique in June 2004, committed themselves
to investing ten percent of their countries’ national budgets on
agriculture.
Khan said even though The Gambia had increased her
budgetary allocation to agriculture from 3% to 6%, it is still short of
meeting the Maputo target set by the heads of state of the ACP.
He remarked, “We are urging the government to do more
to meet up their commitment of 10%. Agriculture is the backbone of
every country. The Europeans and the Americans developed their
agricultural sectors to become food self-sufficient.”
He added that the global food crisis has resulted in a sharp increase on the prices of foodstuffs in the country.
He said, “We have not seen signs of the prices of foodstuff coming down. The prices are still high.”
He pointed out that The Gambia has a vast area of land
and enough water to grow her own food. He therefore called on the
government to invest more on agriculture in order to help farmers to
move away from subsistence to commercial farming.
He posited, “If we continue to depend on imported food,
a day will come when we will have the money, but we will not have food
to buy.”
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