Mahama announces end to foreign financing for cocoa purchases

President John Dramani Mahama has announced that Ghana will discontinue its reliance on external financing arrangements for the purchase of cocoa, asserting that the country has both the financial capacity and institutional strength to fund its cocoa trade independently.

Speaking at the Accra Reset – Addis Reckoning event in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, on Saturday, February 14, President Mahama said his administration would bring an end to the long-standing practice of depending on foreign credit facilities to procure cocoa beans from farmers.

In place of external borrowing, the government plans to mobilise domestic resources through the issuance of bonds to finance cocoa purchases locally.

According to the President, the current system—under which cocoa beans are used as collateral for foreign loans—has restricted Ghana’s ability to fully control and utilise its produce, particularly in advancing local processing and value addition.

“We’re going to stop foreign funding for the purchase of our cocoa. We’re going to raise domestic bonds to buy our own cocoa. We have enough cedis in Ghana to pay for our cocoa. We don’t need to collateralise the beans,” President Mahama stated.

He emphasised that Ghana has the capacity to process up to 400,000 tonnes of cocoa beans domestically but is constrained by collateral arrangements tied to external financing agreements.

“But because the beans are collateralised, we cannot even allocate them to local processors. We have to ship all the beans outside. We can buy them and add value by supplying them to our local processors. That’s what the Accra Reset is all about,” he added.

The announcement marks a significant shift in Ghana’s cocoa financing strategy, with renewed emphasis on domestic resource mobilisation, value addition, and strengthening the local cocoa processing industry under the broader Accra Reset agenda.