President John Dramani Mahama has announced that Ghana will move away from external financing arrangements for the purchase of cocoa, insisting the country has both the financial strength 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 his government would end the long-standing reliance on foreign credit facilities used to buy cocoa beans from farmers.
Instead, he explained, the administration plans to mobilise domestic resources through bond issuances to finance cocoa purchases locally.
According to him, the practice of using cocoa beans as collateral under foreign funding arrangements has constrained Ghana’s ability to control and fully utilise its produce, particularly in supporting local processing.
“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.
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