Day: July 3, 2023

Dr. Emmanuel Opoku, Deputy Chief Executive in charge of Operations at Ghana Cocoa Board (COCOBOD), says Ghana would continue to sell cocoa to the European Union considering the significant progress made in efforts to achieve the goals of the Ghana Cocoa Traceability System (GCTS).

He, therefore, urged all stakeholders to come on board and play their respective roles in ensuring that Ghana becomes the leading producer of traceable cocoa.

Dr. Opoku said these at a COCOBOD/EU/GIZ-SCISP Ghana Cocoa Traceability System (GCTS) Stakeholder Workshop held at Elmina in the Central Region.

According to him, as part of modalities to test Ghana’s readiness to meet the EU regulation passed into law on 29th May 2023, COCOBOD is collaborating with GIZ to pilot the GCTS in the Assin-Fosu Cocoa District to demonstrate the functionality of the system.

This workshop, therefore, offered the platform to inform relevant stakeholders, including, farmers, purchasing clerks and Licensed Buying Companies (LBCs) in Assin-Fosu, of their roles in, and contributions to a full roll-out of the GCTS.

In 2019, COCOBOD began the development of a Cocoa Management System (CMS), a seamless system that captures the bio-data of all cocoa farmers, household information, and the shapefiles of individual cultivated cocoa areas.

Dr. Opoku disclosed that COCOBOD had so far measured 1,239,169 farms with a total of 1,380,566 hectares belonging to 761,753 farmers.

He said the CMS has embedded, in it, a Ghana Cocoa Traceability System (GCTS) that will ensure that all of Ghana’s cocoa beans are traceable from the port to the plot of land on which they were produced.

‘The operationalisation of the GCTS will help to address the phenomenon of cocoa-driven deforestation, prevent farmers from producing cocoa from protected forests, and improve the visibility of the cocoa supply chain to ensure that the consumer is assured of the best production practices’, he added.

In terms of benefits, Dr Opoku said the CMS implementation would revolutionise cocoa farming in Ghana and make it attractive to the financial sector and input suppliers.

The effort would also promote financial inclusion, the emergence of crop insurance, and the design and implementation of an input credit system in Ghana’s cocoa sector.

‘CMS will make it possible to collect farm data in real-time, with a spatial dimension allowing for productivity and yield output calculations in comparison to seasonal forecasted yields. This makes it possible to detect sourcing from protected areas and national parks. If, throughout a season, a farmer located outside a deforestation area is selling at a rate that will go far beyond his forecasted yield output, then much of the cocoa being sold may be coming from unauthorised areas (Forest Reserved/Parks etc..). Accordingly, this can be flagged and alerted, and remediation measures can be put into place,’ he added.

Dr. Opoku urged the Licensed Buying Companies (LBCs) to ensure that their Purchasing Clerks (PCs) register on the CMS to bring the project to a successful conclusion.

Madam Claudia Maier, Country Coordinator for the GIZ Sustainable Cocoa Initiative Support Programme (SCISP), expressed her outfit’s willingness to provide expertise and financial support to ensure the success of the implementation of the traceability system. She said not only Ghana, but the entire cocoa world was looking forward to the system, adding that the piloting of the system at Assin Fosu in the central region will start in September 2023.

Central Regional Chief Farmer, Nana Kwasi Ofori, said data was paramount for effective planning and that the introduction of the CMS would help COCOBOD to work with accurate data and improve efficiency in its operations. He pledged the support of all farmers in making the process a success.

Mrs. Mary Yaa Allotey, Central Regional Administrator of COCOBOD, said the traceability system would promote quality control, operational efficiency and customer satisfaction.

She expressed the hope that the workshop would help participants to contribute meaningfully to all the interventions being implemented by COCOBOD for a more improved cocoa sector.

Source: Ghana News Agency

The Rapid Response Team (RRT) of the Forestry Commission, upon intelligence surveillance, has arrested 13 persons, who were undertaking illegal mining in the Bonsa River Forest Reserve in the Western Region.

A statement from the Commission said the suspects were made up of seven Ghanaians and six Chinese.

The Ghanaians were identified as Halidu Salam, 32; Haruna Sule, 28; Atta Panyin Ayoma, 33;Kofi Taller, 43; Paul Agidi, 32; Amoako Emmanuel,33;and George Aidoo.

The six Chinese nationals were Lua Lin Sie; Lui Chan Nai; Mo Nai Kong; Son Sin; Wei Jia Ping and Niu Wai Sing.

The statement said the suspects had been handed over to the Ghana Police Service in Tarkwa to be processed for court. The RRT visited Epieso and Atwereboanda, which are fringe communities of the Reserve, and a compartment belonging to Samartex Company Limited, where the RRT immobilised five (5) excavators and two (2) motorbikes.

Two long housing units and a number of fuel depots were also destroyed by RRT.

The Ministry of Lands and Natural Resources and Forestry Commission called on the Ghana Police Service to speedily process the culprits for court, and the judiciary to mete out stiffer punishments to the culprits in line with the appropriate legislation.

The RRT was made up of 21 men, drawn from four (4) RRTs stationed at Tarkwa, Prestea, Samreboi and Takoradi.

Source: Ghana News Agency

Osagyefo Oseadeeyo Agyemang Badu II, the Paramount Chief of Dormaa Traditional Area has urged successive governments to endeavour to continue and complete development projects initiated by their predecessors.

Osagyefo Agyemang Badu II, also the President of the Bono Region House of Chiefs gave the advice when speaking at the 10th anniversary memorial lecture organised in honour of the late former President John Evans Atta Mills in Sunyani.

He called on the government to find alternative sources of funding and complete physical educational and health infrastructure projects initiated under the National Democratic Congress (NDC) government, left to deteriorate.

The Bono, Bono East, Ahafo and Western North Regional branches of the National Democratic Congress (NDC) jointly organised the lecture on the theme ‘The Man John Evans Atta Mills-10 Years On’, and attended by leadership of the Party, traditional leaders, youth groups and some Members of Parliament.

Osagyefo Agyemang Badu II said continuity of development projects would improve the nation’s physical infrastructure and urged the government to complete educational and housing projects such as the E-blocks for the benefit of Ghanaians.

He said governments must not play partisan politics with development, saying doing so would deny the citizenry the required development that would better their lives.

Osagyefo Agyemang Badu II cited that it would be unfortunate for any government to abandon the ‘Agenda 111 Hospital’ project if the New Patriotic Party (NPP) government was voted out of power.

He said the nation’s development had been back and forth because of the unwillingness and failure of successive governments to continue with projects initiated by their predecessors and advised politicians to desist from that behaviour.

Source: Ghana News Agency

The Institute for Liberty and Policy Innovation (ILAPI), has suggested the formulation of a new fiscal covenant in Ghana as one of the ways to tackle government expenditure waste.

That new fiscal covenant must outline the parameters within which the Government should spend, what to spend on, how to spend, and when to spend within a budget allocation to avoid non-prioritized and extravagant spending, the Institue has explained.

Mr. Peter Bismark Kwofie, the Executive Director of ILAPI, who made the call, noted that public finance management was key for any democratic state, adding that the legal role of the state was determined through the fiscal covenant or commitment it must have with the people on the back of their taxes.

Mr Kwofie made the recommendation following the publication of the result of a representative perception poll conducted by ILAPI.

According to him, the legal responsibilities of the state as determined by the fiscal covenant must guide the overall pattern of behaviour of the state and the managers of its treasury.

He indicated that there was also the need for legislators to develop fiscal responsibility laws and rules to guide the effective and efficient use of state resources.

He said Ghana, as a democratic state over the years, had found it difficult to act rationally without a fiscal covenant, explaining that a fiscal covenant enforced the necessary clarity needed on the distributive effects of policy delivery, the system of wealth distribution, and the nature of safety.

‘A fiscal covenant leads to the development of consensus on norms, standards, and principles that must guide public policy delivery; the state must be guided, and there should be consistency in that behaviour in terms of how it collects resources and how they can be used,’ he added.

He said such an expectation was only realizable if there were political agreement between social actors regarding the amount of taxes to be collected, in what manner and form the taxes would be collected, as well as how those taxes must be expensed and accounted for.

The ILAPI Chief Executive stated that such a fiscal covenant agreement would state in clear terms, distinct rules for fiscal discipline or tax responsibility through fiscal responsibility laws, legislating on debt ceilings, and reducing executive discretions on revenue legislation that had specific sunset clauses.

He added that it would also cover transparency in public expenditure by establishing regular engagement with all actors in the development value chain.

Mr. Kwofie noted that the tenets of a fiscal covenant would also include the development and design of efficient criteria for the management of national resources through indexing of revenue and expenditure and the insistence on the principles of budgetary unity and universality, among others.

Source: Ghana News Agency

The Livelihood Empowerment Against Poverty (LEAP) programme has benefited some 311 households in the Dormaa East district from 2014 to date, Madam Martha Gmanyami, the Dormaa East Director of Department of Social Welfare announced on Monday.

In an interview with the Ghana News Agency (GNA) at Wamfie in the Bono Region, Madam Gmanyami said beneficiaries had been praising the government for the intervention, saying several households in the district were on the waiting list wishing and desperate to be registered.

She disclosed that social intervention targeted mostly the vulnerable such as the elderly persons of 65 years and above, lactating mothers and other persons with no means of support from their families and any available source of livelihood.

Madam Gmanyami explained that the Department advised beneficiaries to invest the allowances received on bi-monthly basis on profitable small scale income generating activities to increase the value to support themselves and their children.

She said some of them had invested in animal farming like livestock rearing and poultry farm business and appealed for more logistical support like motorbikes to enable the Department to effectively discharge its mandate in the entire district.

Madam Gmanyami said the Department was patiently waiting for the assurance of the District Assembly to build an office for it, as ‘the current office where it operates from is a partitioned mini-conference hall of the Assembly which is not conducive for work environment.’

Source: Ghana News Agency