REPORTS reaching Today indicate that tomato traders who ply the road from Burkina Faso through Buipe to Accra have been seriously affected following the ongoing repair works on the Buipe bridge.
The development, the traders lamented, has affected their business as they cannot bring their cartons of tomatoes to its final destination—Accra—for sale, a situation they lamented, was accounting for the large cartons of rotten tomatoes.
They stated that officials of the Ghana Highways Authority (GHA) and security personnel manning the Buipe bridge do not allow their vehicles loaded with cartons of tomatoes to cross to Accra after 4:00 pm.
As a result of that, the traders said their vehicles are forced to park at Buipe till the next day which makes the tomatoes go rotten.
Unfortunately, the traders revealed that drivers who speed up on the way in order to beat the 4:00 p.m., deadline to cross the dam sometimes get themselves involved in fatal motor accidents.
For instance, they cited a motor incident which occurred on Sunday, March 5, 2017.
The said accident, according to media reports, claimed the life of a trader from Adenta in Accra, and mutilated the legs of two drivers, including their mates while travelling from Bukina Faso to Accra.
“Aside from this, our tomatoes go rotten since it is a perishable commodity. We are therefore calling on the president to intervene by way of impressing upon the security personnel at Buipe Dam to allow only tomato loaded vehicles to cross the dam after the 4:00 p.m., stipulated time”.
Some of the traders, Today gathered, had committed suicide due to their inability to pay loans they contracted from their banks to buy the tomatoes.
Traders at CMB, Agbogbloshie, Kaneshie, Makola, Tudu, Accra-Tema Lorry Park and Odorkor, all in Accra, who made these known in an interview with Today, lamented that the situation was very disturbing as they have been recording losses for the past three weeks.
They further disclosed that there was not a single tomato season that passes in Ghana without some traders committing suicide out of frustration.
The traders bemoaned the fact that “it has become an annual ritual.”
They subsequently appealed to the Ministry of Food and Agriculture (MoFA) to assist them to get better prices for their tomatoes.
Their worry was the fact that huge numbers of tomato traders in Accra who took loans from the banks to buy tomato did not have a ready market for their goods thereby resulting in huge losses.
They indicated that if immediate measures were not taken by government to address the problem, the country’s laudable trade and business policies would be defeated.
They stressed the need for government to intervene so as to avoid the situation where businesses, particularly tomato business, will become unattractive.
They also asked government to create an avenue where there will always be a ready market for tomatoes.
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