Importers and Exporters Association of Ghana has voiced concerns over the country’s diminishing port traffic at the Tema Port, with cargo increasingly diverted to the Lomé Port in Togo.
While traffic at the Tema Port has shown some growth, it hasn’t kept pace with the remarkable expansion witnessed at Lomé’s Port. Lomé’s container traffic has surged from 300,000 per year in the early 2000s to a staggering 1.5 million containers today. In contrast, Ghana’s Tema Port has grown from a similar level in the early 2000s to 1.2 million containers presently.
Dr. George vanDyck, the lead researcher on governance, port clusters, and competitiveness within the Tema Ports, emphasised the urgency for Ghana to foster a conducive business environment to remain competitive against Togo.
The Port Effectiveness and Public-Private Cooperation for Competitiveness (PEPP II) project, funded by the Danish Foreign Ministry, aims to provide policymakers with evidence to guide decisions benefiting the blue economy and bolstering port efficiency.
“Lomé, within the early 2000s, was doing 2 to 300,00 TU, which is 2 to 300,000 thousand containers per year. Now they are doing 1.5 million. Ghana, which was quite predominant in the early 2000s, is now doing 1.2 million, it’s going up but not as fast as Togo is going up. So there’s a lot of competition. What do we have to do? People are saying we are leaving trade to Togo, yes, it’s about creating an enabling business environment.”
Dr. Abena Animwaa Yeboah-Banin, the Head of the Communication Department at the University of Ghana, explained that the project will allow a wider pool of researchers to contribute to the maritime world and the Blue Economy.
“It now allows a wider pool of researchers to take an interest in the maritime world, the Blue Economy. A lot more researchers than were represented in the PEPP project. For instance, now it is possible for people from engineering, fisheries, and physics, whose works may have something to tell the Blue Economy, to take an interest and join the network so that there’s a bigger pool of knowledge being produced about the Blue Economy that can feed into policy and also work in industries.”
During his keynote address, Professor Michael Ekow Manuel, who serves as the Academic Dean of the World Maritime University, underscored the critical need for implementing sustainable practices to safeguard the ocean.
He emphasised that the future success of the Blue Economy hinges on its preservation and sustainability.
“Preservation of our marine ecosystem is paramount. The future of the Blue Economy is green. It is now abundantly clear that we humans cannot continue to treat the oceans as we have always done. As a pristine and inexhaustible supply of natural resources that can take every operational activity undertaken on it without thought to states it and sustainability.”