The list of 19 ministers constituting President Mills’ Cabinet is out. Though President Mills created 23 sector ministries, he is limited to only 19 cabinet ministers as stipulated in Article 76 of the 1992 Constitution of Ghana.

Conspicuously missing in the cabinet is the Information Minister, Ms Zita Okai Kwei. Though there were media speculations that this oversight was due to her competency, it is likely that her ministry was left out to make room for the Ministry of Women and Children’s Affairs, which did not exist during the first NDC regime. Being a non-Cabinet minister suggests Ms. Zita could have problems functioning effectively from outside Cabinet. The functions of the Ministry of Information include facilitating information and feedback, co-ordination of policy; monitoring and evaluation of the implementation of programmes and activities by the Sectors Agencies.

The three other sector ministers left out of Cabinet are Tourism, Youth and Sports, and Chieftaincy. In the last NDC regime the three were similarly not cabinet ministries (see list of Cabinet Ministers below).

In Parliament, eight (8) and five (5) Members of Parliament (MPs) have been appointed to the ECOWAS and PAN African Parliaments respectively. The members are drawn from both the Majority and Minority sides of the house. The reconstitution of the two became necessary because some MPs who served on the two lost their seats while the MP of Bole-Bamboi is now the Vice President.

In other news…

The Bank of Ghana has increased the prime from 17% to 18.5% as a measure to reduce inflation. While the Private Enterprise Foundation feels the increase will increase cost of production which is already a problem for the private sector, the President of the Association of Ghana Industries feels the decision will rather stifle the growth of businesses.

As calm returns to Tamale, violence has erupted in the Bawku Municipality in the Upper East Region leading to the death of five including a woman. Though the Bawku conflict is between Mamprusis and Kosasis ethnic groups, the MP for Bawku feels the recent violence is political and not Tribal. But in any case, the Bawku conflict is similar to the Tamale conflict with chieftaincy undertones. The only difference is while in Tamale the dispute is within the same ethnic group, the Dagomba that of Bawku is between two ethnic groups.

The New Patriotic Party and its sympathizers have heightened their displeasure of Alhaji Mohammed Mumuni, Minister of Foreign Affair and Regional Integration in government. While there are calls for his resignation after an Accra court dismissed his plea for damages from the Daily Guide Newspaper, the Minister feels he will only resign if found guilty of a criminal case.

The Electoral Commission (EC) has begun a post-election dialogue with its stakeholders to assess the performance of the EC. At a forum in Kumasi the EC hinted it will weed out parties that went dormant after elections.

How can Ghana transform agriculture into a modernized sector that makes substantial contribution to overall economic growth?

This year, GSSP is implementing a new workplan organized around this single underlying strategic question. Our research will focus on (1) identifying opportunities for change, (2) analyzing costs and benefits of such development opportunities, (3) identifying constraints to transformation that can be addressed through policy and strategy-making, and (4) improving the quality of sectoral governance.

A number of projects are in the works, including:

• An evaluation of the 2008 fertilizer subsidy program
• A look at how rural service provision affects agricultural productivity, and thus the push for outmigration from the North
• A cost-benefit analysis of private irrigation systems
• An explanation for the low levels of mechanization in Ghana
• A critical examination of farmer-based organizations – when are they useful, and when are they set-up for failure?

Keep posted here for updates on each of these projects and more.

The Ghana Strategy Support Program has released six new Background Papers:

The Role of Cocoa in Ghana’s Future Development looks at the growth and poverty reduction implications of future growth in the country’s cocoa sector. It finds that increasing cocoa production by about 60,000 tons annually is necessary for Ghana to reach its middle-income country target by 2015. However, because cocoa’s poverty-growth elasticity is low, further growth is unlikely to lead to the large reductions in poverty experienced in the past. This finding emphasizes the need for structural diversification, which remains a key challenge for Ghana. By Clemens Breisinger, Xinshen Diao, Shashidhara Kolavalli, and James Thurlow.

Identifying Opportunities in Ghana’s Agriculture: Results from a Policy Analysis Matrix uses a budget-based method to study the social and private profitability of six maize and six rice production systems. It finds that maize systems show a higher rate of return than rice systems. While both systems contributed to national economic growth and private income generation under the high cereals prices that prevailed in 2007, if prices fell to those of 2005, rice would be socially and privately unprofitable. Return to the still lower prices of 2002 would leave both maize and rice systems unprofitable. Priority interventions to alter cost-benefit rations of the cropping systems are ones that reduce the real costs of production or physical and quality losses rather than those that intervene through altering producer prices. By Alex Winter-Nelson and Emmanuel Aggrey-Fynn.

Drivers of Change in Ghana’s Cocoa Sector takes a closer look at the cocoa sector by analyzing the production boom observed between 2002 and 2004. It suggests that most of the increased production can be attributed to good weather, and more intensive use of household labor and, to some extent, of fertilizer. The production boom did not, however, alter the more fundamental problems of the Ghanaian cocoa sector, where yields remain well below those observed in other producing countries. The key constraint of the sector remains its lack of innovation, and questions are raised on the incentives and policies necessary to promote technological innovation in cocoa. By Marcella Vigneri.

What Does Liberalization Without Price Competition Achieve: The Case of Cocoa in Ghana delves into the economic incentives created by the deregulation of Ghana’s domestic supply chain in the 1990s. While it was expected that competition would emerge among private buyers by means of price bonuses and/or premiums, it was found in practiced that instead the increasing numbers of Licensed Buying Companies compete for cocoa supplies based on the provision of different services to farmers. The cash payment and credit for inputs offered by companies to attract cocoa sales mainly benefit liquidity-constrained farmers, enabling them to invest in productive inputs. Since cash-constrained farmers are likely to be the poorest as measured by simple welfare indicators, liberalization may be seen to have had a progressive impact on Ghana’s cocoa farmers. By Marcella Vigneri and Paulo Santos.

Local Impacts of a Global Food Crisis: Food Price Transmission and Poverty Impacts in Ghana takes a local perspective on global food price shocks in Ghana by analyzing: (1) food price transmission from world markets to regional markets in Ghana, and (2) the impacts of differential local food price increases on various household groups. Domestic staple prices are found to be correlated with imported rice prices, but price transmission between regional markets is limited. The negative welfare effect of high prices for households as consumers appears modest at the aggregate national level due to relatively diverse consumption patterns, however the urban poor and those living in the North appear to be harder hit by high food prices than the average consumer. By Godsway Cudjoe, Clemens Breisinger, and Xinshen Diao.

Decentralization and Local Public Services in Ghana: Do Geography and Ethnicity Matter? explores disparities in local public service provision between districts in Ghana.  It finds that district geography plays a major role in shaping disparities in access to local public services.  As well, ethnic diversity has a negative impact on a district’s access to local public services, especially in rural areas.  The negative impact of ethnic diversity decreases as the average literacy level increases.

(Note: Hyperlinks should launch PDF download. If you would like a hard copy, please contact l.horowitz@cgiar.org)

The proceedings of the November 2007 Ghana Strategy Forum “The Role of Agriculture in Achieving Middle Income Status” are now available.

(Note: the proceedings document contains links to the other workshop files. All of the files should be downloaded to the same folder for the links to work properly.)

Proceedings

Agenda

Participants

Presentations:

Growth, Poverty and Agriculture in Africa: Linkages and Policy (Joachim von Braun, IFPRI)

Aiming for Middle Income Country Status: What are the Growth Options? (Xinshen Diao, IFPRI)

Public Agriculture Investments to Support MIC (Sam Benin, IFPRI)

Service Delivery and Accountability (Regina Birner, IFPRI)

Fiscal Decentralisation: What Role Could Local Government Finances Play for Agriculture? (Tewodaj Mogues, IFPRI)

Targeting Smallholders for Agricultural Growth in Ghana (Jordan Chamberlin, IFPRI)

Servicing Smallholders for Market Access (Dr. Ramatu Al-Hassan, University of Ghana)

Drivers of Productivity Growth in Ghana’s Cocoa Sector (Marcella Vigneri, ODI)

Concluding Remarks and Way Forward (Shenggen Fan/Shashi Kolavalli, IFPRI)

The proceedings of the IFPRI-ODI Workshop “Production, Markets and the Future of Smallholders: the Role of Cocoa in Ghana” are now available.

(Note: the proceedings document contains links to the other workshop files. All of the files should be downloaded to the same folder for the links to work properly.)

Proceedings

Agenda

Participants

Presentations:

The role of cocoa in Ghana’s growth and Poverty Reduction (Clemens Breisinger, IFPRI)

Drivers of productivity growth in Ghana’s cocoa sector (Marcella Vigneri, ODI)

International perspectives on the cocoa sector: expansion or green and double green revolutions? (Francois Ruf, Cirad)

Cocobod strategy (Ebenezer Quartey, Research Department, Cocobod)

Cocoa production strategies and the conservation of globally significant rainforest remnants in Ghana (Jim Gockowski, STCP-IITA)

Marketing reforms in Ghana’s cocoa sector: Partial liberalisation, partial benefits? (Anna Laven, University of Amsterdam)

Ghana and the cocoa marketing dilemma: What has liberalisation without price
competition achieved? (Marcella Vigneri, ODI and Paulo Santos, University of Sydney)

2007 Ghana Strategy Forum briefs and presentations are now available on the IFPRI website.

When: November 16, 2007 from 09:00-18:00
Where: Banking College, Airport Residential Area, Accra, Ghana

This one-day forum will bring together policymakers, researchers, development partners, and representatives from the private sector and civil society to discuss and share their experiences and research findings to help inform Ghana’s development strategy design and implementation. The three panels of the forum will address the role of agriculture in achieving Ghana’s goal of reaching middle-income status, how best to encourage inclusive growth, and how to develop smallholder agriculture.

For more information, please download the agenda (PDF, 61K) and press release (PDF,139K).

GSSP background papers are now available. These papers contain preliminary material and research results from IFPRI and/or its partners in Ghana. They address subjects such as growth, agricultural productivity, regional inequality, smallholders, and public spending.

The papers may be downloaded from the GSSP website.

The 2005 Ghana SAM will be officially released on 15 November 2007. The SAM was a joint initiative between the Ghana Statistical Services (GSS) and IFPRI under GSSP. It is the first official SAM since 1993 for Ghana and the final version of an earlier and provisional SAM for 2004 jointly built by GSS and IFPRI. The update and extension was made possible by the release of new data, including the 2005/06 Ghana Living Standard Survey (GLSS5), the 2003 Industrial Survey, and revised agricultural data from the Ministry of Food and Agriculture (MOFA).

The SAM and documentation may be downloaded from the IFPRI website.