Ghana’s Low Cocoa Crop Hammers Trade Surplus in First Two Months

Ghana’s trade surplus narrowed last year as revenue from cocoa and oil shipments declined.

The West African nation’s favorable trade balance shrank 10% to $2.6 billion in 2023, the Bank of Ghana said in a summary of economic and financial data. Total exports decreased 5% to $16.6 billion, driven by an 8.7% drop in cocoa income and 30% slide in revenue from oil shipments, the central bank said.

The world’s second-biggest cocoa producer harvested about 650,000 tons last year, the least in 13 years, amid bad weather and a scarcity of farm inputs. Crude production was down 9.5% at 35.4 million barrels in the first nine months of 2023, according to the finance ministry.

The developments weighed on Ghana’s foreign-exchange reserves, which decreased to $5.9 billion at the end of December from $6.3 billion a year earlier, the data show.

Below are other key economic and financial indicators in the Bank of Ghana report:

Total imports eased 4% to $14 billion in 2023.

Gold exports rose 15% to $7.6 billion.

Foreign-exchange reserves were enough to cover 2.7 months of imports, unchanged from December 2022.

The budget deficit narrowed to 2.5% of gross domestic product in the nine months through September, from 7.2% a year earlier.

Public debt, defined to exclude state-owned enterprise loans, rose to 567.3 billion cedis in the first nine months of last year, from 478.8 billion cedis a year earlier.

Banks’ total loans increased to 77 billion cedis in December from 67.7 billion cedis a year earlier.

Annual loans growth slowed to 13.8% from 25.5% a year earlier.

Capital adequacy ratio dropped to 13.9% from 16.2%.

Non-performing loans rose to 20.7% from 16%.

Monthly mobile-money transactions surged to 199.3 billion cedis in December from 122 billion cedis a year earlier. Bloomberg

March 23, 2024