By Phillip Antoh
The Tree Crops Development Authority (TCDA) has hit back hard at recent media reports alleging massive under-invoicing in raw rubber exports. In a detailed rejoinder, the Authority calls the coverage “misleading, unverified” and most provocatively “paid propaganda.”
The target is a trifecta of publications: the Daily Graphic (31 March), The New Republic (2 April), and MyJoyOnline (1 April). Their headlines spoke of vanishing millions $70 million, even $700 million unaccounted for. TCDA says the numbers are fiction.
First, timing. TCDA notes that a permit system for raw rubber exports was only introduced on 2 May 2025. Comparing 2024 export data when no permit regime existed with 2025 figures is, in its view, deliberately misleading.
Second, pricing. The reports used annual average rubber prices to suggest under-invoicing. TCDA counters that monthly minimum producer prices track global market fluctuations. Averages, it argues, are a crude and inaccurate tool.
Third, the money trail. The figures of $49.6 million and $21 million cited by the media are unverified, says TCDA. No official body not the Ghana Revenue Authority, not the Ministry of Finance has authenticated them.
As for claims that exporters are retaining proceeds offshore, TCDA points firmly to the Bank of Ghana: only the central bank oversees the Letter of Commitment regime under the Foreign Exchange Act. The newspapers, it says, did not bother to confirm.
The reports suggested that rubber exports should be restricted to local processors. TCDA rejects this. Farmers, it insists, have a legal right to sell to any TCDA-licensed actor local or international. To suggest otherwise misstates the law.
The Authority also dismisses the letters portrayed as evidence of “frustrations” among stakeholders. Those, it says, were routine policy correspondence not proof of conflict.
TCDA’s sharpest complaint is omission. The articles failed to mention the Authority’s publicly known interventions and enforcement actions since 2019, especially the May 2025 permit regime. By ignoring these, TCDA argues, the media manufactured a controversy where none exists.
Production and processing figures for 2025 cited in the reports, TCDA adds, came from no mandated agency. “Unsourced and designed to provoke outrage,” the statement says.
The Authority wants more than a correction. It is demanding a rejoinder published on the front page – with the same prominence as the original articles by 10 April 2026.
But the underlying question remains unanswered. Even if the media exaggerated, Ghana’s rubber sector has long struggled with transparency. TCDA’s fierce denial does not close the book; it merely raises the stakes for the next chapter.
For now, the Authority has fired its shot. Whether any of the three newsrooms will grant a front-page rebuttal is another matter. In Accra’s media wars, pride and prominence are not easily surrendered.