President-elect John Dramani Mahama has committed to implementing urgent reforms aimed at revitalizing Ghana’s cocoa industry, ensuring that farmers receive the primary benefits of the sector’s revenue.
He stressed the importance of prioritizing farmers’ welfare by enhancing access to modern farming inputs, mechanization, and fair pricing, to protect them from exploitation by middlemen.
During a meeting with members of the business community, Mr. Mahama underscored the crucial role of agro-processing and agribusiness in strengthening the entire agricultural value chain. He assured that his administration would tackle these issues to promote sustainability and profitability for farmers.
Mr. Mahama encouraged Ghanaian businesses to invest in agro-processing and meaningful digitalisation, stressing the importance of local leadership in processing key crops such as cocoa and soybean to drive economic growth.
Mr. Mahama, I’ll talk to you as AGI to look at how we can increase agro-processing capacity. We have the cassava. We shouldn’t wait for the Chinese to come and set up cassava processing plants. I mean, the Ghanaians who have the investment to set up cassava processing plants. We can process our own soybeans.
We can process all that. We don’t need people to come from Asia to come and buy the soybean and process it for us. So how we can challenge our business people to not only produce pure water, mineral water, and, I mean, open FM stations and things, but to move out into other areas that are profitable. And so, AGI, your advocacy must look to see how you bring people who are into trading and commerce. We are all too enamoured with trading and commerce,”
He continued, ” The service industry is a huge area for investment. Digitalization is there, and I talk about digitalization that is impactful. Not that any app, we just get up and anybody is developing an app and we are chasing it. It must be something that makes a real difference in terms of our productivity and in terms of our lives. So digitalization that is impactful and leads to major changes in the way our people live, “
