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Agricultural Development and Food Systems Economist, Prof Saa Dittoh has asserted that African countries must change the ways they use to estimate the worth of their natural resources and assign a price to them( valuation), stressing that they must adopt the Ecosystems Services Valuation which, for him, is the only just way of assigning value to natural resources.
He described the current valuation – which is primarily an estimate of the quantity of the natural resource in question and the prevailing market price of it – as primitive, urging African countries to move away from it.
“It is high time Africa (Ghana) moved away from the PRIMITIVE valuation of natural resources!
What quantity of gold or diamonds can compensate for ECOSYSTEM SERVICES provided by trees, crops, soils, water, shrubs, grasses, medicinal plants etc. over their lifetime? ECOSYSTEMS SERVICES VALUATION is the only method of valuing natural resources!” He argued in a social media post.
Ecosystem services valuation takes into account the worth of the benefits of the ecosystem within which the natural resource is located.
It also has 40 per cent of the world’s gold and up to 90 per cent of its chromium and platinum, According to the United Nations.