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Ghana: CPP Promises to Retain ADB As a State-Owned Bank
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Public Agenda (Accra)
12 May 2008
Posted to the web 12 May 2008
Frederick Asiamah
A Convention People's Party (CPP) administration will retain the Agricultural Development Bank (ADB) as a state-owned financial institution, Dr Paa Kwesi Nduom, Presidential Candidate of the CPP has promised.
But he said ADB needed restructuring "to ensure that it goes back to the original mission of financing agricultural modernization, production and the processing of raw materials, particularly food for domestic consumption."
The ADB restructuring is one of almost a dozen interventions Dr Nduom intends to make in order to optimise food production and turn around the fortunes of the agricultural sector in the face of escalating food prices on the world market.
Dr Nduom made the promise in Accra last Thursday when he became the second presidential candidate to sign a memorandum of understanding with the Association of Ghana Industries (AGI).
For the first time in its history, the AGI has lined up dialogues with all presidential candidates with an aim to get them to sign MOUs that will serve as evidence of a candidate's commitment to facilitate industrialization and growth of the private sector through interventions that have been outlined in the MOUs.
"It is important that we all recognize the fact that all over the world, governments are taking bold steps to protect food stock by restricting the amount of food items that can be exported. They are intervening on behalf of their people," Dr. Nduom said.
He cautioned that should the practice of restricting the export of food items become widespread, we here in Ghana will face the unpleasant circumstance of escalating prices of food items we eat with its social and economic consequences.
Therefore, "Our policy on food production will require energetic, sustained and well-organised efforts over the next four years, to produce what we need and eat what we produce. It will require the active participation of government - the state - in all aspects of food production."
He named the areas as research, planning, production, storage, distribution and financing.
With regards to food storage, Dr Nduom regretted that over the years, silos in Ghana had been abandoned, while a few others had been sold for purposes unrelated to food storage.
He therefore pledged to rehabilitate those storage facilities as a means of ensuring food security and reducing food imports.
He noted that the country cannot be comforted over the fact that she has marked time over the years in curbing rising food imports. "We know what needs to be done, but we have proven incapable of doing what needs to be done."
He likened the food import situation in 2008 to what pertained in the 1960s and pointed out that what the Seven Year Development Plan (December 1963) of President Nkrumah intended to do to curb food imports was relevant to today's circumstances.
That document stated in part that "Ghana's imports of food during the last eight years have risen enormously much of our hard-earned foreign currency is being spent on food from abroad. It is therefore a measure of one of the tasks facing agriculture during this period of economic development - the need to feed Ghana as far as possible from our own resources."
A CPP administration will therefore ensure the state's positive intervention in food production to promote increased investment, research and application of results, storage and distribution including strategic stock management, the Presidential Candidate said.
In addition, a CPP administration would "Redesign the Food Distribution Company to focus on food storage to ensure national food security, to manage food surplus purchases, manage food silos to be located strategically across the country and ensure even distribution of food to prevent hunger and shortages.
In total, Dr Nduom promised that his administration will not leave the private sector to its fate but will provide it with the requisite support to bring about the needed development.
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Nana Owusu-Afari, AGI Vice President in charge of Large Scale Industries, pointed out that a government "can never grow an economy without industry because it is industry that creates the majority of employment."
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