TRENDS AND IMPACTS OF FOREIGN INVESTMENT IN DEVELOPING COUNTRY AGRICULTURE

GHANA
Trends and impacts of foreign investment in
developing country agriculture
over time, and thus contains a high propensity
for dispute, there appears to be a considerable
richness in the range of situations these rules
cover, and a general understanding among those
who are subject to them.
The government has responded to this wide
spectrum of situations by enacting in September
2008 the Lands Commission Act, thereby revising
and consolidating into one piece of legislation the
existing laws on the various public institutions that
manage and administer land in the country. This
Act intended to create a “one stop-shop” for land
management while improving the delivery of services
of a long list of implementing institutions including
the following involved with property registration.
Despite the plethora of institutions currently
acting to address the land related issues, Ghana
has not yet succeeded in simplifying the process
of acquiring land in a safe and transparent
manner. Most land transactions, especially in
the agribusiness, have involved leases of stool or
skin lands of varying lengths, involving multiple
agreements struck with multiple landlords of
sometimes questionable reputation. The multiplicity
of agreements derives also from the fact that
most agricultural holdings in Ghana are of three
acres or less and that the availability of land
under the control of any particular paramount
chief is limited. In the case of the Golden Exotics
project, for example, which involves 875 acres of
pineapples and 2 050 acres of bananas, the land
acquisition process left the company with some
“hundreds” of lease agreements, suggesting the
need to continue support for programmes/projects
such as the 2003 Ghana Land Administration
Project (GLAP), the Ghana Land Bank (GLB) project
which all aim at strengthening the country’s land
administration while streamlining the current tiring
steps involved in the land title registration process.
Gauging the overall business climate in Ghana
A number of recent studies have extensively
discussed 13 the business framework presented
13 See Doing business in Ghana 2010 report. The doing
business project of the World Bank provides objective
measures of business regulations and their enforcement
across 183 economies and selected cities at the
subnational and regional level.
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above and provided good insights about the
way business has been carried out in the Ghana
economy in general and its agriculture sector
in particular. The following shows in tabulated
form the summary data provided for Ghana 14
relative to other countries. As can be noted,
for 2010, Ghana is performing quite well on
the global scale when it comes to registering
properties, protecting investors and enforcing
contracts in the country. Leaving aside these
areas, the country has a long way to go in many
other areas crucial in the FDI attractiveness as
the global ranking provided below suggests. It
is also worth mentioning that in this same year
and for the first time, a sub-Saharan African
country – Rwanda – was the world’s top reformer,
based on the number and impact of reforms
implemented between June 2008 and May 2009.
There is no reason why West African countries
with enormous resources such as Ghana, Côte
d’Ivoire and Senegal cannot perform effectively
in a way to rank among the top 10 or 20
world reformers. For example 15 , it now takes a
Rwandan entrepreneur just two procedures and
three days to start a business. The import and
exports systems in this country is now seen as
one of the most efficient in the world with the
transfer of properties taking less time thanks to a
reorganized registry and statutory time limits. In
this country, investors have now more protection,
insolvency reorganization has been streamlined,
and a wide range of assets can be used as
collateral to access credit.
14 This table lists the overall “Ease of Doing Business” in
Ghana (out of 183 economies) including the rankings by
each topic. The detailed summary tables discussing the
key indicators for each of the topic listed under review
along with the benchmark information gauging Ghana
against regional and high-income economy (OECD)
averages are also available.
15 Doing business 2010 report – Rwanda; website:
www.worldbank.org or www.ifc.org