Ghana Bags $60m In Inter-State Exports

Ghana bagged $60 million from inter-state trade in export commodities with Morocco over the last five years, the Trade and Industry Minister, Ms Hannah Tetteh, has said.

Speaking at the fourth Moroccan Business Caravan to West Africa in Accra Monday, she said aggregate figures for all exports to Morocco over the past five years averaged almost $3 million.

Ms Tetteh said the volume of trade between Ghana and Morocco was low, especially in these times of globalisation when there were potential investors with investment capital looking for opportunities everywhere to engage in viable businesses.

Consequently, she said, the government would facilitate local businesses to identify partners, facilitate their efforts to develop and grow existing businesses and also enable them to create new ventures that would significantly increase their wealth creation capacities.

She said the ministry was implementing its trade policy with particular emphasis on the projects contained in the Private Sector Development Strategy (PSDS).

She said those programmes had embedded in them provisional support, as well as institutional systems that were designed to catalyse investment promotion and growth.

Ms Tetteh said Morocco had remained an important partner of Ghana in both political and trade relations since independence.

She said history showed that the mutual interests and benefits in trade, tradable goods and cultural exchanges for the two countries had been enduring for centuries.

She said at the same time, Morocco had become a consistent destination for Ghana's fresh fruit exports, particularly pineapples and bananas.

She, therefore, urged Ghanaian businesses to make the most of the opportunities available to match their counterparts from Morocco, explore and discuss possible partnerships and joint ventureship for business growth, as well as new projects.

The Minister of Foreign Trade of Morocco, Dr Abdellatif Mazouz, stressed the need for trade between Morocco and Ghana to be further strengthened to achieve more ambitious levels and accelerate the progress observed in recent years.

He said for the past five years, Ghana had been one of Morocco's top three trade partners within ECOWAS.

He called for the strengthening of the legal framework pertaining to trade relations through the establishment of an ambitious Preferential Trade Agreement (PTA) which might boost the pace of trade and investment between the two countries.