President John Dramani Mahama has announced a major policy shift to end Ghana’s reliance on foreign financing for the purchase of cocoa, declaring that the country can independently fund its cocoa trade.

Speaking at the Accra Reset – Addis Reckoning forum in Addis Ababa on Saturday, February 14, President Mahama said his administration would discontinue the long-standing practice of securing external credit facilities to buy cocoa beans from farmers.

Instead, the government will raise domestic bonds to mobilise local resources for cocoa purchases.

“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,” he stated.

The President criticised the current system, under which cocoa beans are used as collateral for foreign loans, arguing that it limits Ghana’s ability to control its produce and expand local value addition.

He noted that although Ghana has the capacity to process up to 400,000 tonnes of cocoa beans domestically, existing collateral arrangements tied to external financing prevent beans from being allocated to local processors.

“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 move marks a significant shift in Ghana’s cocoa financing strategy, with a renewed focus on domestic resource mobilisation, strengthening local processing capacity, and advancing value addition under the broader Accra Reset Agenda.