Executive Director of the Africa Education Watch, Kofi Asare, has called for the creation of an automatic price adjusting mechanism to deal with the issue of food inflation and the School Feeding Programme.

According to him, if there had initially been an automatic price adjustment mechanism in place, caterers under the programme would not have had cause to be agitating for an increase in what is paid them as a result of the soaring price of food on the market.

Speaking on JoyNews’ PM Express, he said, “Because we have data on food inflation annually, so we should be able to have a mechanism that tells us at what point we have to increase the per-unit cost of production based on food inflation data obtained regularly from the statistical service.”

He noted that without the price adjustment mechanism set in place, when situations such this comes up, it compromises the quality and quantity of food produced for pupils.

“If food prices keep increasing and government pretends that the school feeding programme caterers are going to manage, the management virtually will mean that the quality of food produced will be compromised, the food will be delayed, the quantity will be compromised, or the quality of supervising the delivery of the food service will also be compromised,” he said.

“So let’s have this built-in mechanism so we don’t have to wait for agitations and social movements before increments that we all appreciate that should have taken place within the systematic scheme of things takes place. That is how I think a social intervention programme like the school feeding programme should be managed,” he concluded.