<<Print>>

A business executive, Dr. Kofi Amoah reckons Ghana started on the right note with its development paradigm of utilizing the abundant natural resources of land and people, but veered off course at a point resulting in loss of focus and challenges to its development goals.

Dr. Amoah believes the cocoa project remained the best blue print to Ghana’s development as it brings the land, the people, as well as, government policies together resulting in a perfect collaboration between the public and private sectors.

He is therefore advocating a replication of this policy in the oil palm sector.
“No government has set up a single farm, but with intelligent policies that supported the growth and development of the cocoa project, Ghana became number one producer in the world.

“If you take oil palm for example, a lot has been written about it. Malaysia makes billions of dollars from oil palm. The same example we could have replicated with the cocoa project.”
The astute businessman and economist took this position at a panel discussion on “What Ghana should have done” at the Second Ghana CEO Summit in Accra on Monday.

Submitting further explanations to this postulation, he said the deliberate policy to provide cheap loans, subsidies and extension services to these farmers and the off taking of the beans by the Cocoa Marketing Board (CMB) has ensured the feat so far chalked in the cocoa sector.

The cocoa industry, per records from the Ghana Cocobod, employs approximately 800,000 farm families spread over six of the ten regions of Ghana. The crop generates about US$2 billion in foreign exchange annually and is a major contributor to government revenue and the gross domestic product, GDP. Ghana is the world’s second largest exporter of cocoa.
According to the 2011 Master plan study report (MASDAR) on the oil palm industry in Ghana, West African countries collectively produced 1.63 million metric tonnes (mt) of crude palm oil (CPO) in 2010. Out of Ghana’s 336,000 hectares of oil palm, about 80 percent is cultivated by private small-scale farmers.

Ghana as at the indexed date had an unmet demand of 32,000 tonnes of palm oil. The estimated unmet demand in the ECOWAS sub-region is 850,000 tonnes.

Activities in the agricultural sector remain sluggish as it continues to trail the services sector. It advanced some 3.5 percent in 2016 while the services sector recorded 6.5 percent growth.

But Dr. Amoah believes Ghana, apart from her fertile land and available labour, has an added advantage of a favourable rainfall pattern to grow food and cash crops and compete against other countries.

He argued that the Ghanaian economy is not matured enough to be left in the hands of market forces of demand and supply to determine its direction and commended the one district, one factory initiative which would help the manufacturing sector grow, guarantee higher values and better wages for the working people.