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Rabat – Morocco’s Office Cherifien de Phosphates (OCP) and the Ghanaian government have signed an agreement to build a fertilizer plant in Ghana by 2024.
The agreement is an essential component of OCP’s South-South or intra-African venture, in relation with the “Royal vision” to not only be a regional and continental leader in terms of agricultural output, but also as a fulfillment of the urge to be an indispensable party in the pan-African vision to reach food security and stability.
In a statement to MAP, Morocco’s official news outlet, OCP Africa director Karim Lofti Senhadji said that the agreement was yet another success in the OCP Africa story.
Since its founding in February 2016, Senhadji recalled, OCP’s Africa-centered vision has emerged as a vital, reliable partner for African governments in their shared goal of reaching food self-sufficiency in individual African countries and across the continent.
In addition to signing an array of cooperation deals with a number of African countries to build fertilizer plants, OCP is training local farmers in modern agricultural techniques, or providing local markets with quality fertilizers and other agricultural inputs adapted to the types of soil in their regions.
As has been the case with other agreements between OCP and other governments on the continent—most recently Ethiopia and Nigeria—the goal of the deal with Ghana is to assist the West African country in its food security aspirations. This includes self-sufficiency in terms of consumption as well as an eye, in the long-term, to exporting a number of crops specific to Ghanaian soil.
“Based primarily on Ghanaian and Moroccan raw materials, that is gas and phosphate, this plant will have a production capacity of 1 million tonnes” of fertilizers, Senhadji explained. He said the coming months will be a period of preparation for the final project of building the fertilizer plant.
The preparation period will include, among others, sessions of orientation and training for local farmers, as well as cartography missions to determine the type of fertilizers and other agricultural inputs compatible with different types of soil across Ghana.
The news comes as OCP continues to assert its continental leadership. From the outset of its African venture, OCP has been adamant, in line with Morocco’s increasing visibility in African affairs, to be the driving force in what it hopes will be a “green revolution” in Africa.
The company’s efforts in that regard have not gone unnoticed.
Recently, Nigerian president Muhammadu Buhari was full of praise for OCP and Morocco for boosting Nigeria’s agriculture output and bringing Nigerian agriculture to “the next level.”
“We are taking our focus on agriculture to the next level. In our first term, we partnered with Morocco to revive abandoned fertilizer blending plants across the country,” said President Buhari.
