Mutaru Mumuni Muqthar, Executive Director of the West Africa Center for Counter Extremism, has warned that Ghana is missing a significant opportunity to utilise water from Burkina Faso’s Bagré Dam for irrigation purposes.

Speaking on Asaase Radio's current affairs programme The Forum, on Saturday, 22 February, 2026, Muqthar highlighted the annual spilling of water from the dam as a missed chance to boost agricultural productivity.

“The Bagré Dam, every year we are spilling the water onto our spaces, that often claim life and property. This is a huge opportunity to cultivate that and make sure we are using it for irrigation purposes. We are losing that opportunity to utilise it and we are suffering for it,” he told host Wilberforce Asare.

He stressed the need for urgent government action “because everyday people are evacuated, lives are lost and sometimes there is a lot of fatigue talking about it.

“Government must take this seriously and put in place a mechanism that addresses it in a very comprehensive and sustainable way.”

Muqthar linked the issue to Ghana’s heavy dependence on tomato imports from Burkina Faso, citing structural weaknesses in local agricultural planning and high production costs as key factors.

“One of this challenge is the culture of the Ghanaian trader. They bypass and go to Burkina Faso to buy tomatoes because our own is more expensive than what they have in Burkina Faso. And so, the cost of production for them is excessively higher,” he explained.

He also noted price exploitation as a concern, saying, “Some also make the argument that we tend to be exploitative whiles we don’t have enough, those who do have tend to escalate the prices in ways that are prohibitive to the Ghanaian traders. And I think that we need a strategy that is sustainable to ensure that we are dealing with this effectively.”

The remarks come in the wake of a terror attack in Burkina Faso on February 14, that resulted in the deaths of eight Ghanaian tomato traders, highlighting the risks faced by traders sourcing produce from across the border.