President John Dramani Mahama has positioned Ghana’s agricultural sector as a critical driver of economic transformation, highlighting its vast potential as a comparative advantage for investment.
Speaking at the Presidential Investment Forum at the 9th Tokyo International Conference on African Development (TICAD-9) in Japan, where he pitched Ghana as a stable market with improving macroeconomic indicators, the President emphasized that agribusiness and agro-processing remain central to his administration’s economic growth agenda.
According to President Mahama, Ghana possesses natural advantages that make agriculture and agribusiness highly competitive.
“He mentioned the area of agribusiness and agro-processing. Of course, that is one of the main focus in terms of economic transformation,” he said.
“Ghana has a comparative advantage when it comes to agriculture and agribusiness in terms of available arable lands, in terms of sunshine, in terms of water. We have the world’s largest man-made lake. It’s one of the things we were taught in school, the Volta Lake. And our first president had quite a good dream about what he wanted to do with that lake. And we’re going to capture that in what I talk about when I talk about the Voltaire Economic Corridor.”
He explained that the Volta Lake and its surrounding lands hold immense untapped potential.
“We have millions of hectares of land that border that huge lake. And the water can be used to bring about 2 million hectares of land under irrigation,” President Mahama noted.
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Beyond primary agriculture, he said the government intends to maximize value addition by creating industrial parks to process agricultural products.
“We intend to establish industrial parks so that we can process agri-products. We can invest in textile manufacture for exporting to the EU markets, into the American markets, and other place,” he told investors.
The President assured Japanese businesses of Ghana’s commitment to removing investment barriers, stressing that the new investment climate would make it easier for them to take advantage of opportunities in agribusiness and other sectors.
Source: Starrfm.com.gh
