Safe food for good health and environment.

• Author: Bokor, Raymond K.
• Position: Bio-Repression

It was most gratifying to see Ghana taking bold steps to raise awareness and pragmatic effort to address food safety issues. Culminating in the high enthusiasm with which the first national food safety week in the country was celebrated June 9, 2003 in Accra according to a ghanaweb report. It is indeed true that "there is a direct relationship between the food we ate, our health and the economy," as the Vice President Aliu Mahama noted. We need to recognize the government's responsibility to ensure food security by making food available, affordable, sufficient and safe.

Being a Ghanaian who has been involved in community food security issues and sustainable organic agriculture promotional activities among resource poor farmers, I hold dear the initiative. Thus, my intent is to contribute to the discussion of the article posted and to highlight the need for all to embrace the national food safety celebration.

The environmental and health impact the Vice President had revealed emanating from contaminated food products was most refreshing and at the same time alarming. In the account he noted "about 70% of the economic cost of health problems in Ghana had been attributed to environmentally related diseases because of the circumstances under which "we store, market, prepare and consume our food."

He said the Ministry of Health recently reported that there had been 17,499 cases of diarrhea, 1,781 cases of typhoid fever and 3,000 cases of cholera in Accra alone in 1999. The World Health Organization (WHO) also said unsafe food, a source of food borne diseases, had an annual fatality rate of 2.2 million people; 1.8 million of which were children, according to Vice President Mahama. This situation is disheartening.

Under the heading "Deaths through food poison alarming," the March 23, 2001 issue of the Ghanaian Daily Graphic reported that, "Postmortem analyses have shown that many deaths result from the intake of poisoned food caused through the misapplication of certain chemicals on farm produce and taken in by innocent consumers. It has also been established that the occurrence of some strange diseases emanate from the intake of poisoned food and the wrong application of poisonous chemicals by both small and large scale manufacturing companies...."

The article quotes Director General of the Ghana Health Services, Dr. E.N Mensah, who says that "for instance that postmortems on 3 out of 6 children who had eaten a fruit in the Assin District on...