Director-General of the Ghana Standards Authority (GSA), Professor Alexander Dodoo, has said the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) agreement could prove to be very risky for Ghanaian businesses.
According to Professor Dodoo, despite the enormous opportunities and advantages offered Ghanaian businesses and the country at large under the trade agreement, Ghana faces the risk of easily becoming a dumping place for sub-standard goods from fellow African countries.
A similar reason for which Nigeria closed its land borders last year.
Speaking at a reform dialogue organized by IMANI Ghana and Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) on the topic; What Does the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) mean for Ghanaian Businesses?, Professor Dodoo remarked that an enforced standardisation regime of goods is required to prevent the country from becoming a dumping place.
“As a country we need to ensure that the AfCFTA does not become a risk to us because the risks are there and if we do not enforce our standards regime, we could very easily become a dumping ground for substandard products or products which have been subsided by governments of other African countries to be traded here and that will take our manufacturers and traders out of business,” he stated.
“Yes the AfCFTA is an advantage and an opportunity but it’s a huge risk and if we sleep walk into it by not having the standards structure in place and not making standardisation and related services available and affordable to industry and not enforcing it to have dumped goods removed from the market, Ghanaian traders will literally be a sitting duck at the risk of external forces,” he emphasized.
Adding that, with an affordable and accessible standardisation regime for goods of Ghanaian businesses under AfCFTA, Ghana’s GDP can be doubled.
“I am convinced that with an affordable and accessible standardisation regime, Ghanaian businesses can double our GDP just by their trade because most businesses are SMEs and the ideas to innovate on their products are there but the processes to have them approved and conform to international standards are expensive and so how do they pay for them because it is not free,” he stated.
The IMANI-GIZ Reform Dialogue, seeks to examine the operational aspects of the AfCFTA and provide information to the Ghanaian business community on how they can practically take advantage of the continental trade deal.
It also aims to assess the opportunities and constraints of AfCFTA for the Ghanaian economy, industry and wider investor community.
