The Ghana Grains Council (GGC), with support from the Business Sector Advocacy Challenge (BUSAC) Fund on Thursday, May 26th 2016 held a workshop dubbed ENHANCING GRAIN PRICING POLICY IN GHANA at Sonant Court Hotel, East Legon-Accra.

The workshop was aimed at creating a platform to engage stakeholders in a dialogue to validate and add to the research findings and recommendations, which efforts are geared towards the advocacy for the institutionalization of a standardized pricing policy to promote competitiveness and efficiency in the grain industry of Ghana. The workshop was categorized in three different sections; lecture presentation, group discussion and presentation, dialogue on the way forward.

The workshop with 24 representatives from various stakeholder organizations (public, private and media sector) commenced with a prayer and brief self-introduction by participants after which the Ag. Executive Secretary of GGC was invited to make an address. Mr. Aboagye in his address said it was evident that of the grain sector in Ghana, production is largely done by smallholder farmers and therefore it is imperative that they are assisted to increase returns on their investments to improve their livelihood. He stated that GGC in an effort to improving the livelihood of the small scale grains farmer  introduced successfully the Warehouse Receipts Program, which has sought to help the farmers by providing a structured trading system with arrangements to enable timely agribusiness financing through warehouse receipts.

Mr. Daniel Ampofo Adjei a consultant presented findings of an action research commissioned by GCC as part of the BUSAC funded project. Mr Adjei identified the absence of institutionalized standards as one of the major challenges affecting the pricing of grains on the market. He indicated that though some efforts to introduce some form of standardization in the trading of grains are been made by Ghana Standard Authority (GSA) and Ghana Rice Inter professional Body (GRIB), these were however skewed towards rice sector alone.

[su_custom_gallery source=”media: 4840,4839,4843,4845,4844,4841,4842,4848″ link=”lightbox” title=”never”]

Moreover, the prevailing standards are not mandatory and therefore could not compel all value chain actors to comply with it.  He further indicated that good progress has been made at institutionalizing standards for instance by the Ejura Municipal Assembly were bye-laws have been enacted on the use of a “standardized bag” (100kg) as a precursor to the use of weighing scales. He recommended to the Ghana Commodity Exchange (GCX) should work to meet its timelines to present a fair and transparent pricing s

Comments are closed.