The head of Iran Chamber of Commerce and Ghanaian foreign minister have met and discussed economic ties and cooperation.
Mohsen Jalalpour and Hanna Tetteh called for economic relations between the two countries drawing upon the capabilities of Iranian enterprises, ICCIMA (Iran Chamber of Commerce, Industries, Mines and Agriculture) public relations office report said.
Mohsen Jalalpour highlighted the necessity of strengthening economic ties with West African countries especially Ghana in order to increase trade volume.
“With ample natural resources, a friendly nature, and excellent geographical position, Ghana will gain strategic place for West African economy; the country is an important exporter of cacao, and I believe that the country had not precisely examined the possibility of growing other agricultural products; this gap would provide a ground for Iran’s cooperation with Ghana,” he told the meeting.
“In a time of economic sanctions, Iran’s engineering and technical service sector has gained valuable capabilities, and now with technology and competitive prices, the sector could be active globally in oil and gas, petrochemical projects, transportation, agriculture, pharmaceuticals and medicine,” Jalalpour detailed.
Hanna Tetteh, for her part, told the meeting that in the past decade, “we have taken good steps toward development of our infrastructure and hardware capabilities. Signing a special customs agreement with 15 counties of West Africa will give us access to their markets with the same regulations.”
“We had an annual growth of 25 percent in housing sector and now demands for cement and other materials have grown rapidly,” Tetteh said.
The Ghanaian foreign minister also added that in the past two years Ghana’s economic relations had been affected by international sanctions on Iran’s economy, and “our traders faced some barriers on banking and money transfer; however, hopefully, we will see a boom in our trade volume with Iran with removal of all sanction.”