The signing of the memorandum of understanding by the Ghana Cocoa Board with the Swiss cocoa processor, Buhler, to process Ghana’s cocoa into finished products for the local and the international market is one of the leading stories in the Ghanaian press on Wednesday.
The Graphic reports that Ghana Cocoa Board (COCOBOD) has signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with a Swiss cocoa processor, Buhler, to process Ghana’s cocoa into finished products for the local and the international market.
The agreement also enables the country to tap into the expertise of the company in chocolate processing through training, product development and technology guidance to help build a robust local capacity in cocoa processing and value addition to meet both domestic and international consumption demands.
The agreement was signed at Buhler’s Abidjan office in Cote d’Ivoire last Sunday.
The Chief Executive of COCOBOD, Mr Joseph Boahen Aidoo, signed on behalf of the board, while the President of Buhler for the Middle East and Africa, Mr Heiko Feuring, initialled it for the company.
The CEO of COCOBOD said the agreement would deepen the strong relationship between Ghana and Switzerland, as well as enable them to share more experiences in cocoa processing, where both are significant players.
Mr Aidoo said Buhler was one of the top-class organisations in the world when it came to chocolate technology and expressed the hope that Ghana would leverage the agreement to also enrich its cocoa sector.
He said the country had begun a journey on the path of transformation in its cocoa sector and had been looking out for such partnerships to aid the process.
The newspaper says that the Minister for Energy, Dr Matthew Opoku Prempeh has expressed his commitment to strengthening the relationship between Ghana and Nigeria to tap into the latter’s rich experience in the petroleum sector for the mutual benefit of the two countries.
Dr Opoku Prempeh was speaking following a visit to Abuja where he met with his Nigerian counterpart.
The two ministers centered their discussions on leveraging on the experience of Nigeria with which has decades of discovery know-how.
The minister, who is also the Chairman of the Committee of Energy Ministers of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), said that there was the need for collaborative efforts and drawing of useful lessons Nigeria has accumulated over the years.
With Ghana recently joining the comity of oil producing nations, he said, “there is the need to take lessons from Nigeria and learn from all the mistakes they made regarding the signing of petroleum agreements and maximizing their quota of local content and local participation, something Ghana is still getting a grasp on.”
The Graphic also reports that the Registrar-General’s Department (RGD) will, from the end of this month, start a process to permanently remove some 50,000 firms from its database.
Those firms had been registered since 2011 but failed to file their annual returns, in compliance with the Companies Act 2019 (Act 992).
The initial step is to freeze the inactive firms for 12 years, after which their records will be deleted from the system as part of efforts to make the register more credible.
The Registrar-General, Mrs Jemima Oware, who made this known at a sensitisation seminar by the Association of Ghana Industries (AGI) in Accra last Monday, further explained that the exercise had become necessary because the department’s database was bloated with names of dormant and non-compliant firms.
The seminar, held in collaboration with the Registrar-General’s Department, was to update members of the AGI on the new Companies Act (Act 992).
She said the department had, in April 2021, issued the third and final public warning to the affected companies.
Mrs Oware said the companies included those limited by shares and guarantee, including external firms.
The Times says that the Minister of Lands and Natural Resources, Samuel Abdulai Jinapor, has said that the Green Ghana Project, which sought to plant five million trees, has been hugely successful.
He said the demand for tree seedlings was over-subscribed with enormous enthusiasm by individuals and corporate institutions, who took part in the exercise on June 11, 2021.
Mr Jinapor, who is also MP, Damango, made these known in a statement to update Parliament on the success or otherwise of nationwide tree planting exercise.
He said “Mr Speaker, reports received from the Forestry Commission indicates that over seven million seedlings of various tree species were distributed across the country against the Green Ghana planting target of five million trees.
“Even though, planting figures are still being collated across the sixteen regions, provisional figures from the Forestry Commission clearly shows that we exceeded the five million target. This is remarkable and historic!” he said on the floor of the House, in Accra.
According to Mr Jinapor, the exercise has awakened a new national consciousness on the need to plant trees, saying “As I speak now, Mr Speaker, several requests are still trickling in for additional seedlings.
This is a significant step to preserving our environment and ecosystem, which will enable us make our modest contribution to the ongoing global fight against climate change.”
GIK/APA