Trade Minister visits GHACEM

He touched on the company’s corporate social responsibility (CSR), observing that the GHACEM Cement Foundation annually distributed free cement to deprived communities  to improve their health and educational infrastructure.

Mr Gade assured the government that his outfit would continue to honour  its royalties and tax obligations to the country, in the same spirit that consecutively won the company Best Tax Payer (Customs) awards in 2011 and 2012.

For his part, Mr Iddrisu said the government would soon set up an International Tariff Advisory Committee (ITAC) to curtail unfair trade practices in the country’s cement market.

He said the ITAC would particularly address petitions on claims relating to dumping and its consequences on the indigenous Ghanaian market to ensure fairness and a common tariff regime.

Dumping is when foreign businesses operating in a country sell their products at a much lower rate than what they sell them in their mother countries.

That, according to Mr Iddrisu, was a development that the country would no longer tolerate, in that it normally “opens our market to others and they close theirs to us”.

“We will have to strengthen our ECOWAS Protocol and agree on a common tariff regime for all players in the cement business,” he said.

He expressed the hope that such a measure would ensure fairness and protect Ghanaian businesses against unfair trade practices.