Chemicals for farming in Ghana

Vegetables and fruits such as mangoes, green pepper, tomatoes and many more are typically low in calories and filled with essential nutrients, making them an essential part of any healthy diet.

Getting more of these nutritious foods may help lower your risk of heart disease, high blood pressure, digestive problems, vision problems. cancer among other diseases.

In modern Ghana,  vegetables and fruits that we consume are rather causing so many health related problems such as cancer, heart diseases and even loss of lives. These health-related problems are mainly due to the chemicals our farmers use in cultivating and ripening vegetables and fruits.

I live in a community where the inhabitants depend on farming for a living. These farmers mainly cultivate green pepper, cabbage, tomatoes and garden eggs. These are the vegetables we use in our daily meals to make it delicious and healthy for consumption, but little do we know that these vegetables are the cause of our many illnesses and intellectual disability in our children.

Farmers in farming communities are being forced to use these chemicals so they can meet the right price set by buyers. Since the price for vegetables reduce weekly during harvesting season, farmers apply chemicals to speed the growing rate of vegetables to make it ready to sell or else they will run at a loss.

They also apply chemicals to growing tomatoes and these chemicals make tomatoes ripe within a few days and  become ready for sale. But what is most surprising is that these farmers grow what their relatives and loved ones will consume separately without applying these chemicals.

Protective clothing

Little do these farmers know that they are also affected by these chemicals directly because they do not use personal protective wears such as gloves, general body suit, respirators, safety boots and goggles when applying the chemicals to the vegetables.

Due to this, they suffer respiratory diseases, dizziness, abdominal pain, nausea, vomiting, as well as skin and eye problems. They also do not know that the chemicals they apply to the vegetables are also washed into nearby water bodies when it rains and thereby poison the fishes. This leads to so many health problems when people consume these fishes.

The root of all these problems are the produce buyers of the various restaurants in the country and the market women. These are the people who are killing us because of their selfish interest. This is one of the major problems we need to address so that lives can be saved.

Our musicians should help address these issues. They should follow in the footsteps of Shatta Wale who released a song titled ‘Too much chemicals,’ which Ghanaians did not pay attention to. It is a very good song in which he talked about chemicals in our daily lives.

 The government can solve this problem simply by building warehouses in the various farming communities as part of the ‘one district, one factory’ project to buy the vegetables and other farming produce at a fixed price and sell to buyers at a fixed price. This will reduce pressure on farmers and allow them to cultivate vegetables naturally without applying chemicals to them since they know there are warehouses to buy whenever the vegetables are ready, and this will save precious lives by reducing the number of deaths in the country. It will help protect our children since research has shown that children are the ones who are greatly affected by chemically grown vegetables and fruits. It will also reduce illnesses.

The writer is an Environmental Science Graduate. He lives in Begoro.
Tel : 0246475265 Writer’s e-mail : peterbestannan@gmail.com