A statement issued by the Centre and copied to the Ghana News Agency (GNA) to mark World Food Day said food was a basic human right and it was imperative for every country including Ghana to invest in efforts to maintain a resilient climate-compatible agriculture and food systems among other challenges, to boost food security.

 It said this was the way to go to sustain the interest of the Country’s food crop farmers, which seemed to be waning due to the changing and unfavourable weather conditions’ fluctuations in market prices, as well as lack of ready market for their produce.

The World Food Day is a day set aside to show commitment to the Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 2, which aims among other things to achieve zero hunger by 2030.

The statement signed by Sulemana Issifu, CCCFS Research Director said achieving the 17 SDGs would never come to pass if “we do not end hunger, maintain sustainable, resilient climate-compatible agriculture and food systems”.

 “The CCCFS is not concerned about just the availability of food but accessibility by many Ghanaians as our research suggests that access to food was not that easy in the Country”, the statement said.

 Making references to buttress this, the statement pointed to its research conducted in the Brong Ahafo and the three regions of the north which indicated that farmers were abandoning their farmlands not because they were not interested in farming, but because they could no longer deal with the changing weather and lack of market for their produce.

This, the statement said resulted in a worrying trend where families in farming communities who used to engage both in subsistence and commercial farming, were surviving by buying food stuff instead of cultivating.

On the International scene, the statement said out of the 129 countries monitored by the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), 72 had already achieved the target of halving the proportion of people who suffer from hunger by 2015.

 “Over the past 20 years, the likelihood of a child dying before the age of five has been nearly cut down by half, with about 17,000 children saved every day. Extreme poverty has also been cut down by half since 1990.