National Rice Festival opens today

The first-ever National Rice Festival is scheduled to open today at the Efua Sutherland Park, Accra.
The two-day event of training workshops and local rice exhibitions forms part of the 8th General Assembly of the Ghana Rice Inter-professional Body (GRIB) -- A national umbrella organisation of rice stakeholders.

“GRIB is stepping up efforts to introduce new standards for the production of local rice by the end of the year.

This entails instituting quality-control mechanisms to ensure local rice is produced to meet international standards. It will see GRIB become the certifying body for locally-produced rice,” GRIB President Mr. Imoro Amoro, said.

He added that packaging is a major factor to be considered in ensuring local rice competes favorably with imported ones on the market.

“Packaging is one of our biggest problems because the local packaging cannot be compared to that of the imported rice. So if we want to address this, we at least guarantee that the quality of the rice can equally be appealing as the imported ones.”

He stressed that in the past rice was eaten mainly by wealthy people in the cities, but today it is eaten by everybody.

The event will attract various local and international stakeholders in the rice industry to deliberate on challenges and opportunities in the sector, and introduce new initiatives targetted at improving the capacity of stakeholders to produce more rice for local and international consumption.

The two-day event, on the theme ““Growing a vibrant rice industry through public-private partnership for food security”, will also afford stakeholders an opportunity to stress the significance of improving the private sector’s capacity to grow the local rice sector.

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