Exporters want harmonised export rules

Participants in an export seminar in Accra have called for the hamonisation of regulations governing exports from the country.

This, they wanted, to be done through a holistic review of the laws that established and currently regulated the Ghana Standards Authority (GSA) and the Food and Drugs Authority (FDA).

The review, they also expected, should aim at synchronising the operations of the two institutions to remove the duplication in the system currently.

“FDA and GSA are giving us headaches because of their laws so there must be a resolution. The FDA has in its law certification and GSA also has in its law that it needs to set up machinery to ensure that export products are certified, this should be resolved,” an exporter, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said.

One of the exporters wondered why they were made to deal with the two institutions on similar issues when that could be done once.
They subsequently called on the Ministry of Trade and Industry and the Ghana Export Promotion Authority (GEPA) to work on resolving the issue, explaining that the present duplication of efforts reduced productivity.

A delegate of the German Industry and Commerce in Ghana (AHK), Mr Patrick Martens, in an interview said a major challenge with exports from Ghana to Germany was the lack of synchronisation of standards.

He said the GSA and the FDA performed multiple roles which made it more complicated.

He said another challenge was how Ghana could move from a commodity exporting nation into a more value added manufacturing industry.

Specifically, he cited agriculture as a crucial sector which could be developed considering the opportunities.

FDA and GSA

The GSA is the national standards body established by the Standards Decree, 1967 (NLCD 199) which has been superseded by the Standards Decree, 1973 (NRCD 173).

The FDA is the national regulatory body under the Ministry of Health with the responsibility of implementing Food and Drugs Law of 1992, (PNDCL 305B) to regulate the manufacture, importation, exportation, distribution, use and advertisements of food, drugs, cosmetics, medical devices and household chemicals with respects to safety, quality and efficacy.

A Principal Regulatory Officer at the FDA, Mr Kofi Essel, said the best practice would be to single out commodities that already had agencies handling them -from the control of any other agency or else, it would amount to repetition of efforts.

“We will be doing repetition of work because if each of us is to go by our mandate, then manufacturers would be paying double for the same service and which will not make sense,” he said.

He suggested that the Ghana Export Promotion Authority, GSA and Ministry of Trade and Industry should engage in a dialogue and come out to explain the role of the FDA.

“I believe the framers of the law and those who set up the FDA knew why it was necessary that you leave the standards organisation alone, and create a regulatory body to regulate based on the standards, because a standard certification body is not a regulatory body, and you don’t serve as a standardisation body and at the same time regulate the standard that you set and this is a practice the world over,” he said.

Mr Kofi Essel emphasised that local manufacturers and producers could not violate regulations under the pretext of promoting made in Ghana goods.

He said the current export regime was such that the FDA had a mandate to ensure that the safety of food and the general rules applied and not only think about the safety of consumers in Ghana.

“So first and foremost before any company applies to send any product that is regulated outside, we need to ensure that company’s operations is known by the FDA whether it is food or cosmetics and that it has been given manufacturing licence by the FDA. You need to be known by the FDA before you can think of exporting,” he said.

The export seminar

The seminar was targeted at prospective exporters and existing ones and aimed at fostering and facilitating trade between Ghana and Germany.

It was organised by the delegation of ???? in collaboration with Fidelity Bank and Enhancing Growth in New Partnership (ENGINE), a project implemented by TechnoServe with funding from the Department for International Development (DFID) that seeks to equip micro and small enterprises (MSEs) with the necessary skills and resources to improve their businesses. GB

Writers Email: ama.baafi@graphic.com.gh