By Ansah Boateng Samuel
The Chief Executive Officer of Messiah Organics Chain, Nana Dwomoh-Doyen Benjamin has admonished farmers in Ghana and other African countries to as a matter of urgency desist from killing the insect pollinator population in the country. According to him these pollinators are gradually becoming an endangered species due to the wrong usage of chemicals by local farmers.
In a radio talk show program on Obuoba FM monitored by the New Crusading Guide, Nana Dwomoh-Doyen; who is a passionate environmentalist, entreated farmers in the country to respect the role certain insects especially bees and butterflies play to ensure food security.
“Not all the insects you see in your farms are harmful to your crops, some insects are pests that feed off your crops, while some insects are pollinators whose activities in your farms helps the flowers to turn into fruits. If you apply chemical pesticides at the time that your crops are flowering, you end up killing most of the pollinators whose role is to ensure that pollen grains can move from the anther to the stigma of flowers”, he said.
According to him, the Ghana Cocoa Board has recently introduced hand pollination due to the inability of insect pollinators to effectively pollinate the cocoa trees.
“Manual pollination is good. If done right, its able to increase crop yield by more than a hundred percent. Manual pollination however is a very herculean and sensitive task which the older cocoa farmers cannot handle. Whiles we are trying to train more young people into hand pollination service, we should equally look at improving the effectiveness of the natural pollination agents, thus the insects in the environment especially bees. This is the reason why Messiah Organics Chain is actively educating farmers to switch to organic farming practices and inputs, or at worse educate them on the right usage of chemical pesticides”, he stated.
Nana Dwomoh emphasized the need to rely on verified research in the areas of pesticides usage and its effect on insect life. Adding that most crops are pollinator-dependent, hence a decrease in pollinator agents due to human activities can drastically affect food security. He mentioned other historic antecedents from other parts of the world and encouraged government and institutions to critically look into the matter
“In 1989 thereabout, after the devastating Hurricane Hugo, huge aerial applications for mosquitoes were done in South Carolina in the US. The year after, watermelon growers who did not have beehives in their fields, observed the fruit begin to develop, then abort, or develop into small deformed fruits. There were entire fields that never yielded a single usable melon. Some growers went out of business; others began to seriously manage pollination from that point. This is an available research for everyone to verify. Are we going to kill all the insect pollinators so that human beings will completely do the work of insects?”, he quizzed.
The findings of this paper confirmed that pollinator declines could translate directly into decreased yields for most of the crops grown in Ghana.
As part of his advice, he encouraged farmers to spray pesticides very early in the morning when pollinators such as bees and butterflies have not moved into their farms in search of nectar or completely switch to sustainable organic farming practices.
Messiah Organics Chain is an agribusiness organization mainly engaged in the commercial production of organic foods through a chain of organized out-growers using internationally certified organic farming protocols, training and other related services to make organic farming processes less cumbersome and cheaper for all stakeholders.
They provide a turnkey organic farming support services encapsulating the complete value chain of organic farming to facilitate easy group organic certification audits.
