Ghana Welcomes New TV Station "ETV Ghana"

I snapped this while at Ring Road last Saturday. Given the size of the billboard, you would be forgiven for thinking that the brains behind this new station have quite a bit of money. You woul d not be wrong, for Global Media Alliance--responsible for the erstwhile "Sunday World" newspaper in Ghana--has teamed up with the South African counterpart to launch this free-to-air station. It already has a running website: http://www.etvghana.com.

Suffice-to-say, it is not pulling any stops either!

Those Shoprite Cartons (of Chicken) are From South Africa!

Ok, so it was never any real secret that a retailer like Shoprite was going to retail only Ghanaian goods. A good number of goods were always going to be flown in from South Africa.

This picture I took says little except when you check the narrative, which is very simple. After taking the picture of this guy offloading cartons to go prepare the very delicious chicken that many Ghanaians from all walks of life like to come to Shoprite to buy, I asked him where so many of these are coming from.

I guess you know the answer by now.

Frozen South African chicken flown to Ghana when there is a vibrant, albeit dying, poultry industry here!

Go figure!

PS. It's deeply ironic that in looking for a link about Ghanaian poultry, I should come across an article, entitled The Chilling Effect of Frozen Poultry Imports, written today, that looks at how much of a big business the poultry industry is in Ghana. There's an interesting quote that is great food for thought:

According to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation, Ghana spends more than 1.2 billion dollars annually on rice imports, which rose from 121,000 metric tonnes in 1993 to 507,600 in 2002...

Ghana imported 26,000 tonnes of chicken in 2002, mostly from the European Union, where farmers receive generous subsidies. Two years later this figure had almost doubled, to about 40,000 tonnes. The annual import bill currently hovers around 30 million dollars.