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what you are saying. That is what many of our leaders don’t do; they say
one thing and do another and of course when you do that, it is difficult for
people to trust you and cooperate with you.
Question:
What will you do to ensure food security?
Prof. Mills:
Food security merely means availability of food for the present and also
provision for the future. And I am happy the question is linked with self
reliance. When the global food crisis arose, I wish the Government had
gone out to support the growers of local rice. Instead, we were trying to
take tariffs off imported rice. That tells you the extent to which we are self
reliant.
But what do you do with food security? First of all, you must make sure
you produce enough. And how do you produce enough? We’ve told you,
you must modernise agriculture, you must have the right inputs with marketing,
with dams, with the supporting elements in agriculture.
Two, we will have to make sure that what we produce we are able to preserve.
Now what form does the preservation take? Agro-processing; we
are recommending that we have a buffer stock management agency so that
in periods of glut they go onto the market to purchase. We want to construct
silos so that the extra can be preserved.
Then we want to look at post-harvest losses. In this area, I believe that
science and technology can play a part. We can use nuclear energy to preserve
the food. But when we talk of food it’s not only crops and then fishing,
even though I agree very much with you. You are talking about poultry.
What are we doing about poultry? We may need, as a government, to
encourage people to have large scale plantations of maize and soya beans.
So the whole thing is a package that we have to look at and I do agree
with him that we have to grow what we eat. We have a situation where we
are importing everything into this country, all the food crops. How many
people go seriously into agriculture? So agriculture is no longer attractive
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