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Franchise Transportation System that Fit African production capacities, road conditions...
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OUR TRANSPORTATION SYSTEM:
Transportation is a specific limitation to all marketing and food availability in Ghana. The reported effective additional cost of transportation has been estimated as about seventy percent of the actual market price. The problem of transportation and it constrain on agriculture is not only accessibility due to limited availability of roads, but the non-availability of vehicle also. The vehicular sizes seem to be much bigger than the roads they must ply on, this is also true of both the farm roads and inter/intra-city roads, there seem to be a miss-match between the roads and vehicular transport sizes.
The limited trucks available in the country have to make the best use of cost and time, such that most of the mid transport trucks and so-called articulator trucks overload their capacity and present current and eminent danger to the operators and the general public. Increasingly these trucks are involved in accidents, holding-up the whole transportation system for hours on end.
One of the reasonable arguments for independence was the rail development of Ghana. It was argued then, that the rail system ended in Kumasi and not in the North, because that was enough for the colonial administration interest. Fifty years later, the conditions still remain, with self interest still a rail system to the north is becoming difficulty, although sizable agriculture produce are produced in the north and the rail system that get to Kumasi is ill-functional. We are also aware of the cost of a first class road, somewhere in the neighborhood of $10 million per mile. So what do we do now? With expansion in agriculture, we will need more roads and more vehicular transport. To work around the high cost of rail and road transportation, we have suggested the PODS system as transportation system of choice for some agriculture production (http://pods.com) .
The PODS system can be tailored to the production sizes and at multiple locations of the production centers. The containers sizes are variable, the containers can be disengaged from the trucks while waiting for loading, and multiple containers can be carried by a single truck. The PODS modified containers can be secure enough to be used as temporal or longer term storage. It will also limit head loading which is now a problem with the International organization of child labor laws and human abuse in the cocoa industry, the PODS containers are smaller and durable enough and can be at the production areas only to be picked up when ready. They will be connected to logistic software as UPS or FedEx. And there are now available technological hard and soft wares to track the position of various trucks in real time. Negotiations are going between MAO and PODS
E-mail: ansah-yiadom@maoafrica.org