50% of Ghana’s farm produce go to waste each year

Ghana loses about half of its farm produce every year due to the country’s inability to store and process them.

According to the Programme and Country Representative for USAID Initiative, the Ghana Agricultural Development and Value Chain Enhancement Project (Advance Project), the government must put measures in place to process perishable crops to save the country huge sums of money.

Programme and Country Representative for Advance Project, Dr. Emmanuel Dormon argued that the country's post-harvest losses will increase if storage facilities are not provided.

“If at the time of harvest we are not ready to market because there are little processing and few appropriate storage facilities for such perishables. There is almost no processing of tomatoes in this country. So you go to the north, the Pwalugu area, they produce under irrigation and yet they cannot sell, not at the price that is good for them.”

Dr. Dorman admitted that even though successive governments have built storage facilities in parts of the country, the facilities are idle because they are not accessible to farmers.

“They look at how much it cost them to farm, then pay for the storage and then pay for transportation as well. So they don’t see the incentive to store their produce.”

He added that there are too many farmers with little produce such that the storage facilities are mostly not filled.