Ignacio Burrull, Head of Cooperation, European Union Delegation to Ghana says his outfit would continue to offer unflinching support to ensure Ghana expand its export and manufacturing base in the near future.

Mr Burrull insisted that it is high time developing countries including Ghana took steps to remove the bottlenecks hampering the growth of the sector.

He offered the advice when addressing participants at a forum of Trade Related Assistance and Qualty Enabling Programme (TRAQUE) in Accra on Tuesday.

The two-day event, which is funded by the European Union, is dubbed “National Forum on Technical Regulations and Standardization in Ghana”.

“The EU will continue to offer support to ensure the growth of Ghana’s trade sector and moving forward stringent measures must be adopted to arrest the myriad setbacks,” Mr Burrull added.

The forum which was officially opened on Tuesday by the Minister of Trade and Industry, Haruna Iddrisu featured experts who focused on the need for exporters and manufacturers to strive to meet minimum requirements for international market standard in order to avoid loss after investment in production.

Mr. Frits Hendricks, a quality expert at TRAQUE, in his presentation said “exporters and manufacturers have to ensure that they know the quality their buyers want. If you fail to produce the quality of what your buyers wanted, it would result to waste of investment into the product.

Ms Kinga Malinowska, who made a presentation on the EU Export help desk, took participants through process of finding out the standard of every product. Ms Malinowska, however, refered the participants to EU website: www. Exporthelp.europa.eu.

TRAQUE is aimed at offering continued support to the Ministry of Trade and Industry in private sector development, trade facilitation and capacity building with special attention to capacity issues, industrial strategy and post EPA implementation support as well standards, national quality institutions and trade; private sector export support organisations.