Ghana to end foreign cocoa financing; process minerals locally by 2030.

Описание: President John Mahama has announced sweeping reforms that will see Ghana purchase its cocoa using domestic currency and cease exporting raw mineral ores by 2030, marking a decisive shift toward economic sovereignty.

Speaking at the closing of his high-level side event, “Accra Reset’s Addis Reckoning,” held on the sidelines of the 39th African Union Assembly of Heads of State, President Mahama detailed immediate steps Ghana is taking to break free from exploitative financing arrangements that have long constrained the country’s cocoa sector.

“One of the key decisions we’ve made is to stop accepting foreign funding for the purchase of our cocoa. We are going to raise domestic bonds. We have enough Cedis in Ghana to pay for our cocoa,” President Mahama declared, outlining a radical departure from decades-old practices.

The President revealed that Ghana’s cocoa crisis had brought the structural problems into sharp focus. After setting a producer price when international cocoa traded at $7,200 per ton and the Ghana Cedi stood at 11.5 to the dollar, market fluctuations created significant losses when prices fell to $4,200, and the Ghana Cedi appreciated to 10.7 per dollar.

More critically, President Mahama exposed how foreign financing arrangements have hamstrung Ghana’s capacity for value addition. “You know what the collateral for the funding is? Our own cocoa beans. You collateralise the beans with the financier, buy them, ship them, and they pay you the international market price,” he explained.

“You know the interesting part? We have the capacity to process 400,000 tons of those beans in Ghana, but because they are collateralised, we cannot even allocate them to local processors. We must ship all the beans outside.”