Why Ghana is spending millions on tomato imports today

We produce tomatoes in this country. There are good soils, plenty of sunshine and people are knowledgeable about the work. So why do we spend hundreds of millions of cedis each year importing tomatoes?

The truth is not with the harvest, we produce about 50% of our needs so it's not like we have nothing to offer. What's wrong is the post harvesting phase. Almost 50% of what farmers harvest are spoiled due to no cold storage and no refrigerated transport to preserve the tomatoes until they are delivered to consumers. And because of that, the farmer loses money and the food waste is in Ghana, so we import to make up that gap ourselves.

You can take Burkina Faso as a great example, they sell us tomatoes during our dry season because they have irrigation and we do not have enough rain before the tomatoes are harvested, they can sell their tomatoes on a consistent basis while we have to wait for our seasonal rains before harvesting.

The paste situation is a little bit different. We have several paste manufacturing facilities in place, but the facilities do not have enough local tomatoes to operate efficiently so we end up importing paste from Europe and Asia. It's not like the facilities are not there, the facilities exist and demand exists, but there is a gap between the two.

If only our farmers had better seed varieties, cold storage and irrigation systems, we would be able to close this gap. This is not secret information, it's too obvious for us to pretend it's not the case. Ghana has the land and people who want to farm the land, but they are not connecting with the marketplace to close the gap causing us to lose about 1 billion cedis annually.