The Ghana Poultry Project (GPP), funded by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), in partnership with the Ghana Standards Authority (GSA) intends to increase targeted sector commercial performance by building coordination between firms while promoting competitiveness for domestically produced poultry eggs.
Speaking at a forum on the theme ‘Stakeholders’ Sensitization Forum: Standards for Edible Eggs-In-Shell’, Chief of Party of the USDA-funded Ghana Poultry Project, Carienne de Boer explained that, the forum seeks to project a more concise and informative standard that will help producers and consumers to understand what it means to buy eggs for what quality.
“With joint efforts, we have worked with stakeholders of the Egg Sellers Association of Ghana and the Ghana Standards Authority to come up with the vetted and approved standard giving way for awareness creation,” she said.
Adding that, the role of GPP is to build the capacity of the value chain actors and how to advocate for what they want by working together with the government to ensure their concerns are well addressed.
“We are now at the stage of helping them disseminate the information on egg standard which is a newly developed tool through pictorials to make it easier for people to understand what is written in the Ghanaian standard because at the end it has to be a practical tool which must be part of all their activities,” she added.
The mandate of GPP is to ensure that the poultry sector in Ghana remains active and successful despite the competitive market. “We are working on improving production areas. This might be record-keeping, policies implementation and security. This might be what will ensure that the whole sector follows principles and that consumers will be more interested in buying local products and feel comfortable to eat them.”
National President of the Egg Sellers Association of Ghana (ESAG), Madam Elizabeth indicated that the standardization championed by GPP in collaboration with GSA will greatly help simply because the eggs they receive sometimes are not good enough to sell on the market therefore the standardization is just a good step in the right direction.
“Sometimes the shells of the eggs brought to us are soft making it difficult to sell them. Most people do not even like the white yolk but rather prefer those eggs with moderately yellow yolk. Therefore, with the new standard, people will be aware of which eggs to buy and which ones they should not buy”, she said.
Adding that there has been constant encouragement with the poultry farmers to ensure quality production of eggs.
Explaining that the best way to ensure we have quality eggs is when poultry farmers give their birds with the right feed to help them produce quality eggs for consumption.
“We encourage the farmers to ensure quality production of eggs to make our work easier”, she added.