When Finance Minister Dr. Cassiel Ato Forson presents the 2026 Mid-Year Budget Review to Parliament tomorrow, agriculture will be one of the sectors investors, businesses and farmers will be watching closely. The industry has spent much of the year battling supply shocks that have weighed on production, even as the services sector continues to drive Ghana’s economic expansion.
The Ghana Statistical Service (GSS) reported that real GDP expanded by 6.4 percent in the first quarter of 2026, up from 6.2 percent a year earlier, but the composition of that growth has drawn attention to a widening gap between sectors. Services grew by 7.1 percent and contributed 48.3 percent of overall output, driven by a 25.2 percent surge in information and communication.
Agriculture, by contrast, expanded by just 4.0 percent, weighed down by an 18.5 percent contraction in fishing, even as forestry and crop production posted modest gains. Industry, meanwhile, grew by 6.9 percent on the back of mining and oil activity.
The disparity has coincided with a string of disruptions that exposed how thinly Ghana’s food supply chains are stretched. In March, Burkina Faso’s government suspended all fresh tomato exports “until further notice,” citing a need to protect domestic processing plants. The decision struck at a trade Ghana had long depended on; the country sources between 70 and 80 percent of its fresh tomatoes from its northern neighbour, a trade valued at close to $400 million annually.
Trade and Industry Minister Elizabeth Ofosu-Adjare warned at the time that the disruption threatened not only food supply but also agro-processing businesses and household budgets.
Agriculture Minister Eric Opoku later moved to calm public anxiety, telling reporters that government would scale up irrigation and improve seed varieties, but he conceded that Ghana’s underlying production gap, a deficit of nearly 300,000 metric tonnes against annual demand of 805,000 tonnes, left the country structurally exposed.
He pointed to the roughly 30 percent of local tomato output lost to poor post-harvest handling as evidence that the shortfall was as much about domestic inefficiency as external dependence.
The trade’s human cost had already been laid bare weeks before the export ban took effect. On February 14, a truck carrying Ghanaian tomato traders was caught in a militant attack in Titao, in northern Burkina Faso, with some eight traders killed and others injured after the vehicle was set ablaze.
President John Mahama extended condolences to the affected families at the Ghana Tree Crops Investment Summit, and the Ghana Air Force subsequently evacuated survivors for treatment at the 37 Military Hospital. The Ghana Union of Traders’ Association (GUTA) described the killings as “tragic and unacceptable” and pressed the government for stronger protection of citizens who cross into the Sahel to source produce.
That episode underscored, well before Ouagadougou’s export suspension, that Ghana’s tomato supply chain rested on a route that was becoming unsafe as well as increasingly unreliable. Indeed , the Vegetable Producers and Exporters Association of Ghana (VEPEAG) linked the Burkina Faso Attack to Ghana’s Tomato Supply Gaps, appealing to government to prioritise the rehabilitation of existing irrigation schemes to support year-round tomato production and reduce the need for traders to travel outside the country.
Onions have faced a similar pattern of volatility. Ghana draws the bulk of its dry onion imports from Burkina Faso, alongside Niger and Nigeria, and cross-border disruptions along these corridors, including truck hold-ups on the Niger-Nigeria transit route earlier this year, have repeatedly triggered price spikes and localised shortages in markets such as Adjen Kotoku.
Ginger has proved even more disruptive to the inflation picture. A crop disease that officials describe as “strange” and still not fully diagnosed has devastated ginger farms over the past two years, forcing traders to turn to imports from China, Côte d’Ivoire, Nigeria and Togo.
The commodity has become the single fastest-rising item in the Consumer Price Index, recording annual inflation of 102.5 percent in June, ahead of shrimps and mangoes.
These pressures have fed directly into headline inflation, which climbed to 5.3 percent in June, its third consecutive monthly increase after falling to a low of 3.2 percent in March. The Ghana Statistical Service attributed much of the uptick to non-food and locally produced goods, but the persistence of high-inflation food items emphasizes how exposed household budgets remain to agricultural supply shocks, even as the broader disinflation trend holds.
The 2026 Budget, presented last November, had already signalled agriculture as central to the government’s development agenda, with GH¢245 million allocated to food security and agro-industrial programmes, GH¢828 million earmarked for 1,000 kilometres of agricultural enclave roads. A further GH¢6.9 billion was committed to a national oil palm development policy running through 2032.
The events of the first half of 2026 have made a case that agriculture policy in Ghana can no longer be treated as a routine budget line. Tomato, onion and ginger shortages each trace back to the same root causes: thin buffer stocks, heavy reliance on cross-border supply, weak post-harvest infrastructure and limited disease surveillance capacity.
Thursday’s review will show whether the Finance Ministry intends to address these structural weaknesses with reallocated resources and firmer implementation timelines, or whether agriculture will again be described in ambition rather than delivered in output. The coming months of harvest and trade activity will make the answer difficult to obscure.
