CMC launches 50th anniversary

The Cocoa Marketing Company (Ghana) Limited (CMC) says the forward sale of cocoa beans is  its highest achievement in the 50 years of the company's existence.
Launching the 50th anniversary celebration of the company in Accra, the Managing Director of the CMC, Nana Oduro Owusu, said “the CMC has so far stood out as the only parastatal that undertakes forward sales of cocoa beans and products”.
The celebration is on the theme “50 years of cocoa trade- Sustaning the momentum towards the achievement of the one million metric tonne production target” and would run from now till June.
Th launch which also saw the unveiling of a new corporate logo for the CMC, brought together the company’s stakeholders in the cocoa business, past executives and board of directors as well as MDs.
According the MD, the CMC’s forward sales and pricing strategy had over the years enabled the COCOBOD to “determine a free on-board (FOB) price which forms an important ingredient in the determination of the producer price paid to farmers for the upcoming cocoa year”.
“COCOBOD’s success in external borrowing for the trade facility which, in the last sixteen years has enabled the board to finance to cocoa purchasing was made possible by the collateral arrangements provided by the company’s forward contracts”, Mr Owusu noted.
He observed that the money borrowed over the last 16 years for the initiative had risen from US$ 10million in the 1993/4 crop year to US$1.2 billion in the 2010/11 year.
On the future of the company, Mr Owusu said the CMC as a company responsible for sales and storage of cocoa of the nation’s bean would “re-strategise our current modus oparandi” as it awaits the attainment of the one million metric tonnes of cocoa in 2012/2013 set by the COCOBOD.
“Our aim therefore is to ensure that whatever the level of the increase in the volume of the production, we would be able to sell, store, evacuate and ship accordingly”, he added.
He, however, mentioned limited warehousing infrastructure and labour intensive  nature of the company’s operations as factors that require attention as the nation moves to attain the one million metric tonne target by 2013.
According to him, the dramatic shift in the world of shipment of cocoa from bagged to bulk and containerised shipment has placed the country in a tight corner due to its only facility for bulk lodgement at Takoradi.
The Takoradi facility, he said “appears to be overburdened and lacks adequate capacity to handle the increased demand for bulk shipment of Ghana’s cocoa”.
“Its location at Takoradi makes it even more restrictive and unavailable for the handling of the larger volumes of cocoa which are shipped from the Tema Port”, he noted.
Mr Anthony Fofie, the Chief Executive Officer and Board Chairman of the CMC, said the COCOBOD was “edging closer to our production target of one million tonnes.
But that, he said, also came with challenges and, thus called on stakeholders of the cocoa industry to join hands to meet the set target.
He was optimistic that the new corporate logo of the CMC which was unveiled would “spur on the management staff of the CMC to put in their best to move in tandem with the theme of the anniversary”.
The CMC Ghana Limited was established in June 1961 following the movement of the Ghana Cocoa Marketing Company (UK) Ltd in London to Accra.
The company is currently a wholly owned subsidiary of the Ghana Coca Board and engages in marketing and maximisation of revenue from the country’s cocoa bean.