Organisers of the annual Ghana Rice Festival have scheduled this year’s event for October 7 and 8.
This will be the third in the series since the festival was launched in 2014 to promote quality Ghana rice consumption and its health benefits to consumers.
The event will be under the theme: ‘Eat quality Ghana rice for a healthy life.’
Ghana’s rice import bill currently stands at $500million annually. The Ghana Rice Inter-professional Body (GRIB) is ramping up efforts to reverse the trend by encouraging the consumption of more home-grown rice.
Executive Secretary of GRIB, Evans Sackey Teye, speaking to Class Business, said there was the need to showcase the quality of Ghanaian rice to consumers in a bid to woo them to acquire the taste for Made-in-Ghana rice.
“Over the years, we have realised that consumers saw the rice to be of very poor quality and the Ghana rice inter-professional body is a body that is an umbrella body of all the rice actors in the value chain of rice production. So, from farmers, marketers, those who process it and all that [we asked]: ‘What are you going to do to get to the Ghanaian consumer?’ We have to work on the rice quality so we have been working on that,” he stated.
“There has been a lot of training for farmers, marketers, producers and processors and now that we are getting that good quality, good packaging and brand, then we need to make sure that consumers are aware of the new quality brands that are on the market, that are very competitive with the foreign brand that we buy. Although our rice has a superiority of being fresh and tastier because it has not been kept for over five years like we get from others… the festival is to showcase what we have, and then get consumers to pick more of the Ghana rice on the shelves.”
Source: Ghana/AccraFM.com
