Average annual trade deficit: $400 million

Ghana is currently trading at an average annual deficit of 400 million dollars for four years now, making it a nation in deficit with almost every country in the world, Mr. Kwadow Affram Aseidu, Deputy Minister of Trade, Industry and President's Special Initiatives, has said.

He said government was committed to reversing the trend through an export oriented industrialization drive focused primarily on agro-processing and other manufacturing activities that would involve mass mobilisation of rural communities.

"As a country we simply import too many things and export far too little," The Deputy Minister noted.

Mr. Aseidu was speaking at the maiden annual general meeting of the Federation of Association of Ghanaian Exporters on Monday, organized to review activities and plan the way forward towards enhancing the sector's performance.

He said the second strategy of the programme would be a comprehensive domestic-market oriented industrialization programme targeted at producing locally, a substantial proportion of non-petroleum government imports, as well as processed foods and agricultural products imported by individual and companies.

"Government had harnessed all available resources to build, improve and sustain a viable Non-Traditional Export (NTE) sector so as to diversify our export trade," he said.

Mr. Aseidu announced that government, in collaboration with local yam exporters would soon come out with regulations to streamline the yam export through single corridor marketing arrangements that would ensure up-front payment and eliminate huge losses exporters had suffered at the hands of unscrupulous importers.

"Just as we have done with the other President's Initiatives, the success of this new marketing approach will be duplicated for other major NTEs such as salt and kola, but only if the stakeholders themselves welcome the idea".

Mr. Aseidu said, of the three million exporters, exporting 246 products last year, only 46 products earned a million dollars or more, the rest were in the low thousands.

This, he said, was obviously unsatisfactory as it indicated that too many of our exporters were operating at uncompetitive levels.

Mr. Tony Sikpa, the Vice President of the Federation called on the government to carry out an inventory of the export sector to identify specific needs for support, because there was the need to build capacities of exporters in business and administration to enable them to develop the appropriate structures.

He said the country's scientific institutions must support the export market with research into products, appropriate preservation methods, innovative products and direct them towards reaching standards set by the World Trade Organisation.