Ghana mulls setting up a local futures market

03:17 p.m Jun 10, 1999 Eastern

ACCRA, June 10 (Reuters) - Ghana is looking into the idea of setting up a futures exchange with local and foreign financial experts studying its feasibility at a two-day workshop organised by the Ghana Stock Exchange in the capital Accra.

``A futures market will reduce risks suffered by (commodity-) price fluctuations,'' said Yeboah Amoah, the managing director of the Ghana Stock Exchange, at the opening on Thursday.

South Africa is currently the only African country with a futures market.

Ghana is an important gold producer and the world's second largest cocoa producer with an average annual crop of 335,000 tonnes of cocoa beans and has pledged to partly liberalise its cocoa exports by October 2000.

Neighbouring Ivory Coast, the world's top cocoa producer, is to fully liberalise its cocoa sector at the start of the 1999/2000 crop season, on October 1.

Ivory Coast and Ghana are looking at ways to ensure that all cocoa trading would be in forward sales, Ivory Coast's Foreign Trade Minister Guy-Alain Gauze told journalists on Monday.

On Thursday, Gauze went to Ghana, accompanied by the head of the New Caistab, Ivory Coast's commodities supervisory body, and representatives of cocoa exporters, according to a press release issued by his ministry.

The Ivorian minister is to meet with officials of Ghana's COCOBOD marketing board and with government officials.