Abubakar Afful addressing the media
Fairtrade Africa, a global movement seeking to address injustices of conventional trade, has urged media practitioners in the country to lead the campaign to make living incomes for farmers a reality.
Programme Team Leader of Fairtrade, Abubakar Afful, who made the call, said “this is to help ensure that farmers who are dedicated to producing valuable crops get decent standard of living from their earnings in order to guarantee sustainable yields and improve farm efficiency.”
Addressing the media at a capacity building workshop for journalists in Kumasi, he stated that paying farmers a sustainable price for their crops would help smallholder farmers break the poverty circle and bring prosperity to rural communities.
He defined a living income as sufficient income to afford a decent standard of living for all household members, including a nutritious diet, clean water, decent housing, education, healthcare and other essential needs plus “a little extra for emergencies and savings” once farm costs are covered.
“Smallholder farmers have virtually no control over global market prices and weak to non-existent negotiating power, thereby being at the mercy of price volatility and the goodwill of their market partners,” the Fairtrade officer noted.
According to him, in times of oversupply and market speculation, commodity prices tend to fall below the cost of production to the extent that farmers cannot break even, intimating that such developments have disastrous consequences on livelihoods of farmers and the long-term sustainability of supply.
“When farmers are trapped in poverty, they can’t afford to invest in more efficient or productive farming methods to improve their incomes. They can’t pay their workers a decent wage, or worse, they may resort to using children for cheap labour,” Mr. Afful pointed out.
From Ernest Kofi Adu, Kumasi