EDIF Act to be amended to include agriculture - Minister

Accra, April 28, GNA - The Ministry of Trade and Industry (MOTI) will soon present to Parliament a proposal for the amendment of the Export Development and Investment Fund (EDIF) Act, to turn it into Export Development and Agricultural Investment Fund.

The amendment would expand the mandate of the fund to provide financing for agricultural and agro processing.

Ms Hanna Tetteh, the sector Minister, said this on Thursday in a contribution to a dialogue session dubbed: 93Assessing Ghana's Path to Industrialisation 96 Government's Interventions So Far," at the on-going Ghana Policy Fair in Accra.

She said the new Act when passed would expand the raw material base for agro-processing businesses to provide assistance to the sector.

The five-day fair is to enable Ministries, Departments and Agencies and Metropolitan, Municipal and District Assemblies to showcase Government policies, projects and activities. The Minister said the Ministry also intended to present to Cabinet an Industrial Competitiveness Bill to provide incentives for promoting the use of local raw materials, and increasing domestic content in local industry.

"We are of the view that this combination of measures should put us on the path of industrial growth and development and help us to achieve our goal on accelerating industrial development," she added. Dr George Dawson-Ahmoah, Vice President of the Association of Ghana Industries (AGI), said though government had laudable policies and programmes there had always been serious gaps in policy formulation, implementation as well as monitoring and evaluation. "At the formulation stage, we notice that Government sometimes does not put out some of its proposals for discussion with the key stakeholders before inclusion in the budget statement, a typical example being the 20 per cent environmental tax on plastics," he said. Dr Dawson-Ahmoah said in the area of monitoring and evaluation, there was hardly any serious collaboration between Government and the private sector.

"Therefore, we took up the challenge in 2008 to form a coalition of AGI, Ghana Employers' Association, and the Ghana National Chamber of Commerce and Industry to monitor the extent to which Government policy statements in the National Budget were being implemented. "I am glad to say that we had very good co-operation from the Budget Implementation and Support Team and we think this should continue," he added.

Dr Dawson-Ahmoah said when policies were developed, there was the need to have a clear feedback mechanism which should not be limited to Government functionaries implementing the policy, but the direct beneficiaries should also be actively involved. He said part of the lapses stemmed from success indicators which were not well-defined to help with tracking and called for strengthening of monitoring and evaluation of government policies and programmes to assess the impact.

Professor Stephen Addei, former Rector of Ghana Institute of Management and Public Administration, said the time had come for Ghana to have a policy to protect agricultural raw materials.