The Ghana Commodity Exchange (GCX) has registered various market actors as members including Ghanaian farmers in an effort to forge a long-term partnership with smallholder farmers.

This is also to encourage them to use the Exchange’s warehouse receipt system and trading platform to sell their commodities to the wider Ghanaian and African markets. 

These farmers are from various regions of the country, mainly in key production areas of maize, which is the commodity the Exchange has piloted and will be trading first during this year’s harvest

To complement the GCX effort to support the farmers to use the Exchange, GCX has signed on commodity brokers to support the cooperatives that are not able to trade themselves. The commodity brokers will undertake trade negotiations and execute sell and buy orders on behalf of the farmers and other traders as well as support them with price information and trade settlement.  

The actors were trained on national grain standards, post-harvest loss management, warehouse receipts, warehouse receipts financing, membership rules & responsibilities, minimizing the risk of trading and the general rules of GCX. 

The market actors will be presented with GCX Membership Certificates upon completing membership integration training to enable them to participate in the GCX warehouse receipts financing and to trade successfully on the GCX trading platform. 

The Exchange is soon to deploy an electronic trading system where buyers and sellers negotiate prices at the Exchange’s headquarters in Accra.

After a year, the Exchange will provide remote access to all users to trade from their various destinations. Settlement is expected to be done one (1) day after trade. Currently, to allow cooperatives to trade successfully, members are represented by floor reps to trade in Accra where the Exchange’s electronic trading platform is located. 

The CEO of the Exchange, Dr Kadri Alfah said “We hold in high regard the confidence the farmers and cooperatives are placing on us. We have set out to build on a long-term relationship that will ensure that we continue to support the cooperatives to meet their immediate and changing needs. We want to build good business relationships with the farmers because we cannot achieve our goals without them.”