The Israeli Trade and Economic Mission has organized a VIP investment Forum to  get companies and business advisories to invest in innovative agricultural projects.

The forum was held at the Agri Sustainable Farm in Dawehnya in the Greater Accra region to give the prospective investors a feel of Israeli technology by touring the farm.

The VIP investment forum was an exclusive event for top management personnel of investment companies and business advisory companies, where they interacted with top five excellent Israeli agriculture turnkey companies.

Speaking on the sidelines of the forum, Israeli Ambassador to Ghana, Shani Cooper said trade relations between Ghana and Israel trade is not the best, and the way to improve it is to invest in value addition.

“Currently, the trade relations in general are low and that’s because we’re looking only at commodities that is traded between Israel and Ghana. But, I believe Israel has value in supplying Ghana and the means to to add value to their products."

"So, if we’re talking about cocoa or if we’re talking about tomatoes or anything else actually, Israel can bring the know-how and the experience...and Ghana will have the results at the end of the day as well as the money,” she stated.

The event included a tour of a farm that uses Israeli technologies in their operations.

Speaking to Joy Business after the tour, Isreali Head of Trade and Economic Mission to Ghana, Ayelet Levin-Karp indicated that Israel looks forward to more collaborations with Ghana.

“AgriTop is an example of a collaboration between Ministry of Food and Agriculture and Israeli company that’s helping in green house farming. The graduates of this programme have gotten the opportunity to train in Israel for a year in horticulture.”

“On the private sector, we see activities in various sectors from the more advanced cyber security, fintech, data driven activities for agriculture, health technologies, infrastructure of course and water technologies. So, there are lots of areas of collaboration and they are different kinds of collaborations; and what we’re trying to drive is to try to see how we can promote research and development. Israel is very strong in research and development, and we think that more can be done in collaboration with the Ghanaian market,” she said.

A prospective investor, Kirk Adaboh Agyekum, Managing Partner at Pan-African Business Developers, believes Ghana has great potential in agriculture and his outfit looks forward to partnering with the Israeli Embassy in investing in technology to improve the sector.

“We have very great potential here in terms of agriculture output and then how better we’re going to improve the livelihood of some of these small holder farmers. Pan Africa business developers are participating in this programme. We will see how we can be leverage some of the agric technology that the Israeli Trading Mission is providing."

“In fact, our organization has been in talks with the embassy [Israeli] over the past six months about how best we can both collaborate in working to support smallholder farmers. We’re in no doubt that after today’s investor forum we will work with the Israeli Trade Mission,” he stated.