Two Ghanaian companies were among 166 organisations that Wednesday received the 2007 WorldStar Awards for excellence in packaging. Polycraft Ghana Limited was awarded for Vitamalt Plus carton while Unilever’s Blue Band Good Start Margarine carton box was also honored.

31 countries worldwide took part in the competitive awards including four African countries namely, South Africa, Ghana, Zimbabwe and Tunisia. The top awards went to Japan and United States winning 14 awards each, followed by 13 awards to Germany, South Africa and Brazil 12 each, and China 11. For the African nations, Tunisia had one prize while Zimbabwe took home two awards. The world star award for packaging was instituted by the World packaging organization, WPO, to acknowledge the innovations and contribution of packaging to trade and consumerism.

Speaking at the award ceremony in Accra, the president of the WPO, Mr Keith Pearson said the WorldStar competition is one of the major events of the WPO as an initiative to motivate packagers and packaging converters to improve their productions. He noted that African packaging industries need to do upscale their packaging industries to enable Africa chalk more revenue in global trade. The number of African countries at the final awards is a reflection of the continent’s standing in international trade as the volume of manufactured goods constitutes only 20 percent of Africa’s total exports.

At the national level, 21 oragnisations also received the Ghana Star Awards. Ironically, no government official was at the award ceremony, though the organisers, Institute of Packaging Ghana (IOPG) sent four invitations to the sector Ministry of Trade, Industry, PSI and Private Sector Development. IOPG top executives, including its President Kofi Essuman expressed unhappiness that no representative of the ministry could attend such an important event though the sector minister, Joe Baidoo-Ansah, delivered the keynote address during the opening of the African Packaging Summit Conference & Exhibition as well as the launch of the 40th anniversary of the WPO. What saddened the IOPG officials the more was that this event would only come again to Ghana after 20 years.