Ban Foreign Traders From Purchasing Seeds In Rural Ghana

Darling Anita, you were our sister in activism, our confidante, our playmate, our friend. We laughed with you, marched with you and will always share and carry on your passion for justice and human rights in our lives. You built the Body Shop with your dearest Gordon, and like the teacher you were, taught the world that business and activism could go hand in hand. The fire of your passion for indigenous rights, the wrongly imprisoned, against corporate evil, and for everyone to stand up and just get on with it will never die. We send our deepest love and heartful sympathies to Gordon, Justine and Samantha. Josh Mailman Richard and Susan Perl Jim and Suzanne Gollin - See more at: http://www.legacy.com/obituaries/nytimes/obituary.aspx?n=Anita-Dame-Roddick&pid=94296731#sthash.aqGqBrtB.dp

Darling Anita, you were our sister in activism, our confidante, our playmate, our friend. We laughed with you, marched with you and will always share and carry on your passion for justice and human rights in our lives. You built the Body Shop with your dearest Gordon, and like the teacher you were, taught the world that business and activism could go hand in hand. The fire of your passion for indigenous rights, the wrongly imprisoned, against corporate evil, and for everyone to stand up and just get on with it will never die. We send our deepest love and heartful sympathies to Gordon, Justine and Samantha. Josh Mailman Richard and Susan Perl Jim and Suzanne Gollin - See more at: http://www.legacy.com/obituaries/nytimes/obituary.aspx?n=Anita-Dame-Roddick&pid=94296731#sthash.aqGqBrtB.dpuPaid Notice: Dea

When the British entrepreneur, Dame Anita Roddick, died in 2007, three friends of hers wrote a moving tribute to her, which they paid to have published in the New York Times, on September 12, 2007.

 I mention that fact to begin today's piece, because she was an ethical, passionate and much-caring businesswoman, who helped  unlock potential wealth in many rural areas of the nations she traveled to, around the world, to buy products for her Body Shop's global chain of cosmetic stores.

She was one of the first Western businesspersons to teach Westerners to  appreciate indigenous cultures.

She did so by pioneering the selling in the West of centuries-old cosmetic products and wellness products from diverse indigenous cultures in all the world's five continents. 

Incidentally, she also traveled to northern Ghana.  All her transactions with indigenous people were ethical win-win deals.

There is a lot of potential wealth that is still locked up in many parts of rural  Ghana. Like Dame Anita Roddick, we must unlock that untold wealth to create jobs and sustainable local economies, for farming communities across the country.

Cottage industries that use local raw materials can become the growth poles supporting sustainable green economies in communities across rural Ghana. Everything must be done, to enable  them to thrive, for that reason.

Yet,  as we speak, foreign traders are busy scouring vast swathes of the Ghanaian countryside, looking for, and buying up, valuable forest products, which could form the basis of  a lucrative export trade for many of those who live in rural Ghana.

The question is:  Why should we permit that to happen - when there is such a desperate need to increase the volume and value of Ghana's export trade?

One doubts very much whether the authorities in nations such as China, Burkina Faso and Niger, would sit unconcerned, and allow Ghanaian nationals to visit those nations, and raid countryside areas there, to purchase seeds to export to Ghana to produce a variety of plant seed oils.

Yet, that is exactly what is occurring in Ghana. Apparently, the activities of traders from China, Burkina Faso and Niger, to name a few, who travel to rural areas here to purchase sundry plant seeds, is having a devastating effect on local producers of pure cold-pressed organic neem seed oil, organic moringa seed oil and baobab seed oil in northern Ghana.

Madam Cynthia Kampoe, the wife in a husband and wife team of serial social entrepreneurs, who work from Tamale with groups of women who have given birth to twins, in the Northern Region and the Upper East Region, to produce organic shea butter, organic baobab powder, organic baobab seed oil, pure cold-pressed organic neem seed oil, organic neem seed cake and organic moringa seed oil, complained bitterly to me recently, about how the purchasing power of seed buyers from China and Niger, had driven up the price of moringa seeds to GHc45 per kilo - a price at which it is apparently practically impossible to produce moringa seed oil for sale locally at a competitive price.

The value chains of their various social enterprises that produce various types of organic seed oils, enable them to offer scholarships to 108 sets of twins in the Northern Region, and 131 sets of twins in the Upper East Region. Those twins are the offspring of the disadvantaged women that Madam Kampoe and her husband work with in the north of Ghana.

Cottage industries in rural Ghana, are important for rural wealth-creation, and the provision of much-needed jobs for ambitious young people, who are eager to work and lay a solid foundation to ensure a good future for themselves - through the income they can  earn and save from such cottage industry jobs in the rural communities they reside in.

It is therefore important that a law is quickly passed that will make it illegal for foreigners to purchase seeds that rural cottage industries can use as raw materials for the production of seed oils such as: baobab seed oil; moringa seed oil; neem seed oil and Voacanga africana seed oil.

All those types of seed oils have lucrative fair-trade markets overseas to which they could be exported by cottage industries located in the north of Ghana and elsewhere in the country - and create local sustainable green economies in many parts of rural Ghana.

Today, there are female Ghanaian social entrepreneurs, such as Madam Cynthia Kampoe, working with women's groups, who also want to repeat the late Dame Anita Roddick's success, by producing and exporting natural products such as organic baobab powder, organic baobab seed oil, organic moringa seed oil, organic pure cold-pressed neem seed oil, and organic neem seed cake.

The activities of foreigners who have monopolised the purchase of different types of  oil seeds across rural Ghana is ruining their businesses. That should never be allowed to happen to any rural cottage industry - in a nation that finds it difficult to create sufficient jobs for young people.

That is why foreign traders must not be allowed to price them out of the market for their raw materials - and prevent them from producing natural fairtrade products that command premium prices overseas, and, like cocoa, could become foreign exchange earners for our national economy.

One's plea to members of Parliament from the three northern regions, is for them to work together, to sponsor a private member's bill, for passage into a law prohibiting foreigners from traveling to areas in rural Ghana, to purchase seeds that can be used to produce oil either for medicinal purposes, or for use as raw materials for village based industrial processing plants.

If they want to do business in Ghana, they must partner Ghanaians  to produce seed oils here, for export to China and elsewhere.

One recalls that in the 2013 MIT Global IDEAS Challenge, an MIT team, MoringaConnect, developed  a moringa seed oil processing plant. They collaborated with the Ghana US Peace Corps, in the implementation phase of that project,  if I remember correctly - although at which point exactly that collaboration took place,  escapes me, alas.

A company, Moringa Connect Limited, was subsequently established in Ghana, if my memory serves me right

Perhaps Moringa Connect Limited,  USAID/Ghana Peace Corps, could collaborate with the National Board for Small-Scale Industries (NBSSI), the GRATIS Foundation and the Savannah Accelerated Development Authority (SADA), to help social entrepreneurs in the areas covered by SADA, who produce baobab seed oil, neem seed oil and moringa seed oil, to acquire modern processing plants?

Perhaps the Women's World Banking Group could be persuaded to provide them with grants/loans for that purpose?

But to ensure that Ghana can add baobab powder, baobab seed oil, moringa seed oil, cold-pressed pure organic neem seed oil and organic neem seed cake, to its list of non-traditional export products, Parliament must ban the purchase of all seeds in both rural  and urban Ghana, from which oils can be extracted, by foreign traders.

It will enable rural cottage industries extracting oil from various seeds to have constant supplies of seeds for processing into sundry oils for sale to both local and export markets - and create wealth and jobs for young people in rural Ghana.

Enough is enough. We must stop allowing foreigners from looting Ghana under various guises. The time has come to ban foreigners from purchasing seeds in any part of Ghana. Period.