President John Dramani Mahama has announced a policy shift that will see Ghana move away from foreign financing arrangements used in purchasing cocoa, stressing that the country has the financial and institutional capacity to fund its own cocoa trade.
Speaking at the Accra Reset Addis Reckoning event in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, on Saturday, February 14, President Mahama said the government intends to end its long-standing dependence on external credit facilities for buying cocoa beans from farmers.
Under the new approach, the administration plans to mobilise local resources through bond issuances to finance cocoa purchases domestically.
The President explained that using cocoa beans as collateral under foreign-backed financing has limited Ghana’s ability to control its produce and support local processing industries.
“We’re going to stop foreign funding for the purchase of our cocoa. We’re going to raise domestic bonds to buy our own cocoa. We have enough cedis in Ghana to pay for our cocoa. We don’t need to collateralise the beans. We have the capacity to process 400,000 tonnes of those beans.
“But because the beans are collateralised, we cannot even allocate them to the local processors. We have to ship all the beans outside. We can buy them and add value by giving to our local processors. That’s what the Accra reset is all about,” the President said.
The move forms part of broader reforms aimed at increasing local value addition, strengthening domestic industries, and ensuring greater national control over Ghana’s key export commodities.
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