Professor Alex Dodoo, the Director General of the Ghana Standards Authority made these known to the Ghana News Agency (GNA) on the sidelines of a three-day awareness workshop on standards, held in Accra.

The cocoa standard were developed through a UNIDO support to the Ghana Standards Authority (GSA) under the Trade Capacity Building Programme for Ghana, funded by the Switzerland Government, through SECO.

Other new standards have also been developed for Fruits, Wood, and Fishery Industries.

Prof Dodoo said a lot, however, remained to be done to ensure that farmers, processors, and the country obtained optimal benefits from the entire cocoa value-chain.Priority should be given to value addition to enable the nation to get more money from the crop.

He said there were no issues about national standards for the cocoa sector for now, but rather it was all about policy and financing to help the farmer and processors earn maximum returns on investment to pay more taxes.The workshop was organised by GSA in partnership with United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO) as part of the Authority’s 50th anniversary celebration.

The GSA was set up to facilitate trade and businesses through promotion of standardisation for the improvement of the quality of goods, services and sound management practices in industries and public institutions.Prof Dodoo said its regulatory services were meant to make sure that goods and services that were traded and consumed both locally and internationally, conformed to international standards.

He hinted at a national cocoa summit in the coming September by the Trade and Industry Ministry to deliberate how Ghana could get a “good slice of the tens of billions being made from cocoa”.Mr. Francis Kangah, a cocoa processor, complained that they had been finding it difficult to get enough raw cocoa beans to process and at affordable prices.

The cocoa processing business, he noted, was capital intensive and asked that the Government assisted the local processors to pay upfront for the beans so they could add value locally.“They can assist us in pre-financing and with processing equipment and that would make sense.”

Mr Kangah said some countries were doing that indirectly through the banks, which had been supporting the processors to buy the beans.