Associate Professor of Finance at Andrews University in Michigan, Professor Williams Kwasi Peprah has called on government to leverage its numerous warehouses in the country to store the excess food in the market to sustain the downward inflationary trend.
His comment follows the slowdown of inflation in the month of August, 2023 to 40.1% from the 43.1% recorded in July 2023.
Food inflation witnessed a decrease to 51.9% from the 55% the previous month.
Reacting to this development on Business Live on Joy News, Prof. Peprah admonished government to take proactive steps to sustain this trajectory.
“The government has already built like 10,000 warehouses across the country. To be able to benchmark some of the stability, this is the time that we have to store most of the food products that we have produced. So strategically now that we have them available we should be able to think of putting plans in place to store”.
He added that, there is the need for government to resource the Ghana Buffer Stock Company to be able to store the excess food on the market.
“More funds should be made available to the Ghana Buffer Stock Company to be able to purchase a lot of food stuffs and store them. And also release them onto the market in times that they are out of season”.
He also noted that there must be the conscious effort from both the government and individual level to control inflation.
“There are a lot of mechanisms that can be put in place, for the macro level. What the government needs to do at the micro level, what the individuals also need to do in our homes to ensure inflation doesn’t get out of hand”.
Meanwhile, inflation in Ghana is on an irregular trajectory – four months of continuous decline followed by three months of protracted rise.
After peaking in December 2022 accompanied by a relatively stable rate in January 2023 and February 2023, many experts projected a persistent drop in price level for the subsequent months.