As part of efforts to mark this year’s Responsib’All Day in Ghana, Pernod Ricard, No.2 worldwide producer of Wines and Spirits, in partnership with A Rocha Ghana, has planted 2400 trees to help restore a degraded mining lands site at Sagyimase, next the Atewa Forest, in the Eastern Region.
Responsib’All Day is a day set aside each year by the Pernod Ricard group, for its workers globally, to engage in an activity that is dedicated to its Sustainability & Responsibility 2030 roadmap ‘Good Times from a Good Place’, and to have a real impact in the community.
This year’s Responsib’All Day commemorated under the theme, ‘Helping to Protect and Restore Nature and Biodiversity’, saw the Pernod Ricard Ghana team plant trees to help restore the deteriorated former galamsey site into normalcy.
Commenting on the restoration and tree planting exercise, Sustainability and Responsibility Manager for Pernod Ricard Ghana and Western Africa, Eunice Osei-Tutu, said move to plant trees was based on one of the four pillars of the company’s 2030 roadmap dubbed ‘Nurturing Terroirs’.
She noted that the exercise directly supported the United Nations SDGs 13, 15 and 17.
“Our 2030 sustainability and responsibility roadmap has four pillars. The first one is Nurturing Terroirs, referring to all the sustainability actions that we take around nature and the environment. Today’s project is under this pillar. In manufacturing our icon products, we use over a hundred ingredients that we source from over 65 countries worldwide and all these ingredients depend on a florishing ecosystem to continue to thrive,” she explained.
She added “For our business to continue to be sustainable, we need to ensure that all those terroirs are nurtured and of course, we humans depend on these terroirs to continue to live and so that is why this year, that theme was chosen.”
According to Madam Osei-Tutu, the total target for the tree planting exercise was twelve and a half acres of which nine and a half acres have already been leveled with different species of plants planted on the land. She further noted that Pernod Ricard is committed to ensuring that the tree-planting project is sustained to fulfill its intended purpose. Thus, A Rocha Ghana, partner of the project, will continue to survey the land, maintain the plants and replant dead plants when necessary.
“This is a former mine site, so no edible crop should be grown on it for at least 10 years. We are going to monitor these trees for at least the next 10 years to ensure the land has been fully restored to its normalcy before any farming activity can continue on it. Our job with A Rocha doesn’t end here, it is going to continue to ensure that these trees are properly managed and nurtured”.
For his part, Deputy National Director of A Roche Ghana, Daryl Bosu, commended Pernod Ricard Ghana for taking an initiative to help protect and restore nature.
“I believe it is a good initiative and we encourage all to support that. As you know, some of these sites have become toxic prone and also dangerous for most communities and the government is looking for the ways and resources to restore them. I believe that if we can have more companies owning up to do things like Pernod Ricard, we are going to see a lot more improvement,” he said.
He added that “if we don’t restore this site, farmers will come here again and try to plant crops and in no time all the chemicals in the land will find its way into our food chain.”
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