Managing editor of the insight newspaper and pan Africanist, Kwesi Pratt Junior has said cooking with tin tomatoes and tinapa (Sardine) makes the meal sexy.
Mr. Pratt who was contributing to a radio discussion on the plight of cocoa farmers in the country on an Accra based radio station opined that the cocoa farmers spend a lot on money during the production of the crop, but are not able to make any gains in terms of profit because of the increase in the prices of goods on the market.
He said ‘’the cocoa farmer buys petrol into the machine that they use to cut down aged trees, to spray the cocoa farm, to apply fertilizer and so on. They use petrol, so the cocoa farmer now is spending more buying, spending more cultivating the crop and getting the producer price at the same level even inspite of exchange rate fluctuations. So the cocoa farmer is worse off. The cocoa farmer also eats, the cocoa farmer also buys tin tomatoes. You should go to the villages and see how they value tin tomatoes. They grow their own tomatoes but they think that a little addition of tin tomatoes spices and makes the food more sexy, so they like to buy tin tomatoes. They like to buy tinapa, they like their akrantie (grasscutter) and so on they use that in cooking but when they get visitors, when you come from Accra and so on, they like to add small tinapa to your food and so on. The price of tinapa is gone through the roofs and so on’’
Mr. Pratt added that the farmers also buy cloths for their wives at the end of the year, noting that the price of the cloths have also gone up astronomically.
He is one of the people who believe government has short-changed cocoa farmers in terms of the price offered to them, and want government to do something about it.
Source: BestNewsGH.com
