The Ghanaian parliament late Friday gave the greenlight to the Ghana Cocoa Board (COCOBOD), the regulator of the cocoa sector, to secure a loan of 800 million U.S. dollars for cocoa purchases and other cocoa sector operations in the 2023/2024 crop season.
The house voted unanimously to approve the deal after the laying of the report of the Finance Committee, which noted that the COCOBOD has enormous goodwill in the financial market to secure financing due to its track record of repayment on time over the past decades.
The finance committee’s report said the trade finance facility would enable Ghana, second-largest cocoa producer in the world, to buy the projected 850,000 metric tons of cocoa beans in the 2023/2024 crop season which opened earlier in September.
The report said part of the loan would also go into cocoa disease and pest controls, fertilizer distribution and application, farmer pension scheme, cocoa roads, and industry inputs, including jute sacks, twine, stencil ink, and passbooks.
In seconding the motion for approval, Bryan Acheampong, Minister for Food and Agriculture and Member of Parliament (MP) for Abetifi, assured parliament that the government would continue to support cocoa farmers due to the importance of the industry to the Ghanaian economy.
“We expect COCOBOD to continue supporting the country in the critical areas it has been doing and enable cocoa farmers to continue producing the crop to support the economy,” Acheampong stated.
Ghana opened the new cocoa season in September, one clear month earlier than the usual opening in October but has struggled to find money for purchases due to the delay in securing parliamentary approval for the syndicated loan.
Earlier this month, Fiifi Boafo, Spokesman for COCOBOD, revealed that the institution had had to fall on cocoa traders to salvage the financing gap created by delays in securing the regular syndicated loan.
COCOBOD had secured between 150 million dollars and 200 million dollars from the traders, to be repaid with cocoa beans.