A Wa based legal practitioner, Saeed Abdul Shakur has criticized the government’s decision to give exclusive right of cotton cultivation to a private company Olam Ghana Limited. The company has been given the sole right to produce cotton in north western zone of the country which covers about 70 per cent of cotton growing areas. Under the arrangement, Olam Ghana Ltd is to support the cultivation of the crop by supplying farmers with resources to produce the crop and will be the only company to buy from the farmers. With this farmers within the zone are denied the right choose who to sell their cotton produce to. This, the legal practitioner believes is unlawful. Mr Shakur said the decision smacked of brute dictatorship and lacked merit under any circumstance. “These are vestiges of dictatorial tendencies [practiced] only in Communist China or probably Muamar Gadhafi’s Libya. Not even in Venezuela can you do such a thing. Unless it is established that the Parliament of Ghana has enacted a law to that effect, it is absolutely wrong…for the [Agric] Minister” to grant such exclusive right to one company, he argued. He told Joy FM’s Upper West Regional Correspondent Rafiq Salam that nobody in the country can be stopped by anybody from undertaking legitimate business in any part of the country. He has therefore called farmers affected by the decision to go to court and seek a declaration that the decision of the government was null and void. Source: Joy News/Ghana