Chairman of Competitive African Rice Platform, Ghana Chapter, Yaw Adu Poku says the local rice sector has now received an ‘angel investor’ to maximise and promote the production of local rice.

He said after several pleadings and solicits, he managed to secure an investment from the Jospong Group for the rice sector.

According to him, the Jospong Group had already paid a visit to Thailand to understudy Ghana’s failure to survive in local rice production.

Mr Poku noted that the company, this month paid flight tickets for thirty-three experts from Thailand to be in Ghana for the next year for a full-scale study to identify the gaps in Ghana’s rice production.

“Now we have an angel investor in the rice sector so next year you will see a different story altogether. Somehow I solicited, pleaded, and begged on my knees and I got the Jospong Group's involvement.

“This man did not only come in, he went to Thailand to understudy why Ghana cannot produce rice, and then just this month he has brought in thirty-three experts from Thailand on his own ticket to live in Ghana for the next year.

“He wants them to do a full- cycle for us to understand where the gaps are, that is the angel investor we have,” he said on Newsfile, Saturday, December 24.

For this reason, Mr Poku is optimistic that the narrative about the local rice sector would be different from 2023.

In 2020, Ghana spent $ 391 million on the importation of rice, becoming the 20th largest importer of rice in the world. In the same year, the country recorded rice as the 3rd most imported product.

Over nine million tonnes of rice was imported into the West African sub-region, representing about $3.4 billion of import bill in 2021.

In 2019, the Government began a campaign to promote local rice and improve the production of the product.

The “Eat Ghana Rice” campaign is part of a series of initiatives that have been rolled out under an Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) funded project to improve rice production in Ghana. 

However, the campaign seems to have not yielded enough results as the country continues to surge in the importation of rice. In this regard, some Ghanaians have called on government to replicate Nigeria’s ban on the importation of rice in 2015 to boost the local sector.