President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo has said the completion of Cargill’s US$13 million expansion cocoa processing facility in Tema underscores the importance of the private sector in the government’s transformation drive.
He said in this time of a global pandemic where industries across the globe were scaling down to uncertainties, this milestone of Cargill was commendable and worth celebrating.
Over the past decade, Cargill’s contribution to Ghana’s economy in terms of investments and exports had been significantly noticed and appreciated. Having increased its initial investment from US$100 million in 2008 to US$130 million in 2021.
Cargill, an American company that has been buying cocoa from Ghana for over 40 years, in 2008, opened its state-of-the-art cocoa processing facility in Tema. The company, which is the largest cocoa processing factory in Ghana has over 330 permanent and contracted employees processing cocoa products to service food and confectionary customers locally and around the world.
Commissioning the factory on Friday, President Akufo-Addo said the government, in its first teem, worked hard to restore the macroeconomic stability, stimulated the private sector through business regulating reforms, and restructured the financial sector to ensure easier access to finance.
The government, the President said, also embarked on ambitious and transformative flagship programmes such as the "One District, One Factory" and the "Planting for Food and Jobs" to accelerate the structural transformation of the economy.
Those innovative flagships programmes, President Akufo-Addo intimated, were to move the economy from the dependence on raw material production to a value-added economy.
"As you are aware, the relationship between a sound investment environment and a well-structured sector-specific industrial policy is crucial for the growth of our economy."
President Akufo-Addo said industrialisation and private sector development presented great opportunities to expand the economy and create more jobs.
He said for Ghana to develop rapidly, it needed to add value to her abundant natural resources, taking into consideration, the country’s structural peculiarities in the history of policy delivery and implementation.
"We cannot achieve a Ghana Beyond Aid when we continue to export raw commodities" and it was against this background that he saw the expansion works at Cargill as commendable.President Akufo-Addo said Government would continue to offer incentives, such as tax rebates and holidays, import duties exemptions for the importation of capital goods, to boost the competitiveness of local manufacturing companies that were adding value to the country’s raw material resources.The President believed that the incentives would allow the private sector to take […]
