Revive Cocoa Processing Company to boost value addition and jobs – Labour expert

The Secretary General of the Ghana Federation of Labour (GFL), Abraham Koomson, has urged government to revive the Cocoa Processing Company (CPC), stressing that adding value to Ghana’s cocoa will create jobs, increase revenue, and strengthen the country’s position in the global cocoa industry.

He argued that Ghana must move beyond exporting raw cocoa beans and instead focus on processing them into finished and semi‑finished products for both local consumption and export.

Speaking on Ahotor FM’s Yepe Ahunu programme, Koomson recalled that Ghana’s first President, Dr Kwame Nkrumah, had envisioned such a strategy when he established the large cocoa storage silos in Tema.

The silos, he explained, were designed to store cocoa beans until favourable prices were available on the international market, rather than forcing the country to sell at low prices.

Reviving the CPC, he said, would not only generate thousands of jobs but also enable Ghana to process and store cocoa whenever global market prices are unfavourable.

This, he added, would give the country greater bargaining power while protecting the incomes of cocoa farmers.

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Koomson lamented that Ghanaian farmers endure enormous hardship in producing cocoa, yet the country continues to export the raw commodity, allowing other nations to process it and earn significantly higher profits.

He described this as an unfair arrangement that Ghana must work to change.

He therefore called on government to adopt a well‑planned strategy that integrates the Tema cocoa silos with a revitalised CPC.

Such an approach, Koomson noted, would allow Ghana to store beans when prices are low and process them into products such as chocolate, cocoa butter, cocoa powder, cocoa liquor, pebbles, and other value‑added cocoa products — similar to the role the company played in its earlier years before becoming dormant.

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