Former Minister for Power and former Chairman of Parliament’s Mines and Energy Committee, Dr. Kwabena Donkor, has called for a deliberate government-led agro-processing strategy, backed by local procurement policies to expand the country’s industrialization drive.
Dr. Donkor believes that Ghana’s industrialisation ambitions must translate into practical measures that create markets for local production. He argues that Ghana can unlock significant economic opportunities by investing in the infrastructure, technology and financial systems needed to process agricultural produce locally, while using government procurement to guarantee demand for locally manufactured and processed products.
Speaking in an exclusive interview with The High Street Journal, Dr. Donkor identified rice milling as one of the immediate opportunities Ghana must exploit to strengthen its agro-industrial base and reduce dependence on imported food.
Rice Milling Could Meet 50% of Domestic Demand
According to him, Ghana must develop the capacity to process locally produced paddy rice into milled rice efficiently and on time, He says the country could meet as much as 50% of its current rice requirements if all locally produced rice were properly milled and brought to market.
He explained that the absence of adequate processing infrastructure and inefficient milling arrangements undermine farmers’ incentives to expand production.
“When your last season’s rice is still unsold, what is the incentive to increase acreage this year?” he questioned.
For Dr. Donkor, agro-industrialisation must go beyond policy statements and become a practical economic programme that connects farmers, millers, warehouses, distributors and consumers.
Government Procurement Must Create a Guaranteed Market
He believes government procurement, particularly for school feeding programmes and secondary schools, offers an immediate opportunity to create reliable demand for locally processed agricultural products.
Citing the billions of cedis government spends on food procurement, he argued that deliberate policies, potentially backed by legislation or regulation, should require public institutions to prioritise locally produced rice instead of importing products that Ghanaian farmers and processors can supply.
Such a policy, he suggested, would provide a dependable market for local producers, encourage investment in milling infrastructure and strengthen the domestic agricultural value chain.
However, he cautioned that procurement policies alone would not be sufficient without the political will and institutional capacity to enforce them. He warned that some importers could exploit loopholes by bringing in foreign rice and falsely labelling it as locally produced.
Ghana, he said, must therefore develop the technical and intellectual capacity to detect and prevent such fraudulent practices.
“We must not just have the policy, we must have the will to implement and we must have the intellectual capacity to detect fraud,” he noted.
A Financial System that Connects Farmers to Millers
Beyond procurement, Dr. Donkor called for a sophisticated financing and purchasing arrangement that takes agricultural produce off farmers’ hands immediately after harvest.
Under his proposed model, farmers would be paid for their paddy rice, millers would receive financing to process it, and the finished products would be stored in warehouses until they are needed in the market.
He argued that this arrangement would address the problem of unsold produce, improve farmers’ cash flow and give them the confidence to increase production in subsequent seasons.
He stressed that the model should not be limited to rice but extended to other agricultural commodities with strong domestic processing potential.
Reduce Imports to Retain Jobs Locally
Addressing the preference some Ghanaian consumers have for imported rice over locally produced alternatives, Dr. Donkor argued that consumer tastes could gradually shift towards domestic products if local alternatives were properly developed and made available.
While stopping short of advocating an outright import ban, he suggested using appropriate tariff and non-tariff measures to protect local production and encourage consumption of Ghanaian products.
“When we import, we are exporting jobs,” he stressed, warning that Ghana cannot afford to export employment opportunities when youth unemployment remains one of its biggest security challenges.
For him, importing products that Ghana has the agricultural capacity to produce and process locally undermines domestic job creation and weakens the country’s industrialisation prospects.
Ghana’s industrialisation drive, he argues, must be built around practical investments in processing capacity, reliable financing, effective government procurement and policies that create sustainable markets for local production.
