|
Ghana Other Commercial Crops
The main industrial crops are palm oil, cotton, rubber, sugar
cane, tobacco, and kenaf, the latter used in the production of
fiber bags. None is of strategic economic importance, and all,
apart from oil palms, have suffered as a result of the country's
economic difficulties. Despite claims that such crops could assist
local industrialization efforts, the government has not focused the
same attention on this sector as on export crops. For example,
sugar cane output has diminished with the closure of the country's
two sugar mills, which produced 237,000 tons per year in 1974-76,
but only 110,000 tons in 1989.
The government has actually encouraged the export rather than
the local processing of rubber, rehabilitating more than 3,000
hectares of plantations specifically for export production rather
than revitalizing the local Bonsa Tire Company, which could produce
only 400 tires per day in 1988 despite its installed capacity for
1,500 per day.
By the 1990s, the tobacco sector was expanding and moving
toward higher export production. Ghana's dark-fired leaf probably
grows too fast and requires too rich a soil to compete effectively
with rival crops, but the potential for flue-cured and Burley
varieties is good. Pricing difficulties had reduced tobacco
production from 3,400 tons in the early 1970s to an estimated 1,433
tons in 1989. Output began to improve in 1990, however, reaching
2,080 tons.
The Leaf Development Company was established in 1988 to produce
tobacco leaf for the local market and to lay the basis for a future
export industry. In 1991, the company's first commercial crop
amounted to 300 tons of flue-cured, 50 tons of Burley, and 50 tons
of dark-fired tobacco (all green leaf weights), of which 250 tons
were exported, earning US$380,000. In 1991 Rothmans, the British
tobacco company, acquired a 49.5 percent stake in the company and
took over management of the Meridian Tobacco Company in partnership
with the state-owned Social Security and National Insurance Trust.
Another firm, the Pioneer Tobacco Company, announced a 92 percent
increase in post-tax profits of more than ¢1 billion for 1991. The
company declared dividends worth ¢360 million, double the amount
paid out in 1990.
Cotton production expanded rapidly in the early and mid-1970s,
reaching 24,000 tons in 1977, but it fell back to one-third of this
figure in 1989. Since the reorganization of the Ghana Cotton
Development Board into the Ghana Cotton Company, cotton production
has steadily increased from 4 percent of the country's national
requirement to 50 percent in 1990. Between 1986 and 1989, Ghana
saved US$6 million through local lint cotton production. The
company expected that between 1991 and 1995, about 20,000 hectares
of land would be put under cotton cultivation, enabling Ghana to
produce 95 percent of the national requirement.
Data as of November 1994
|
