Ghana will take bold steps to overhaul the management of its cocoa sector to ease its dependence on global conditions and sustain it, President John Dramani Mahama said on Saturday.
Addressing the Assembly of Heads of State at the African Union, Mahama outlined the sweeping reforms , including financing for cocoa purchases and export systems, vowing that the West African country which is the world’s second largest cocoa producer would end the reliance on external funding to purchase its cocoa beans from farmers.
“We have the domestic capacity to finance our cocoa purchases internally, so we don’t have to continue depending on syndicated loans to buy cocoa from farmers,” Mahama said.
For decades, Ghana’s cocoa purchases have been financed through foreign loans backed by cocoa beans as collateral. According to Mahama, this arrangement has limited the country’s ability to retain value from its most important export.
“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.
The President revealed that the structural weaknesses of the system became clear during recent market volatility. Ghana had set a producer price when international cocoa was trading at $7,200 per ton and the Ghana Cedi stood at 11.5 to the dollar. When prices later fell to $4,200 and the Cedi appreciated to 10.7 per dollar, the country absorbed significant losses.
More critically, Mahama noted that Ghana has the capacity to process up to 400,000 tons of cocoa locally but cannot allocate beans to domestic processors because they are tied to foreign financing agreements.
Under the new policy, Ghana will raise domestic bonds in Cedis to finance cocoa purchases directly from farmers. The move is expected to unlock 400,000 tons of cocoa beans for local processing, potentially creating thousands of jobs and significantly increasing value addition within the country.
Mahama framed the reform as part of his broader “Accra Reset” agenda, aimed at restructuring Africa’s economic relationships and prioritizing domestic industrial capacity.
“From Addis, we must stop talking and start implementing,” he concluded, urging African leaders to move from policy discussions to concrete action.