Every year, Ghana plants with hope, and too often, harvests with heartbreak. As the 2025 bumper harvest season approaches, the signs on the farms are encouraging. Yields of tomatoes, maize, plantain, and other staples are expected to surge across key food-producing zones. But behind the optimism lies a stubborn, recurring fear: that a large share of this bounty will go to waste, again.
Dr. Frank Ackah, a Senior Lecturer at the Department of Crop Science at the University of Cape Coast, believes the country is far from ready to absorb what it is about to harvest.
Speaking to The High Street Journal, he warned that Ghana’s post-harvest handling, from storage and preservation to distribution and marketing, remains weak, outdated, and largely neglected. “We’re likely to experience the same thing we’ve seen year after year,” he noted. “We focus on production, but not what happens after.”
It’s a pattern that’s become all too familiar. During peak harvest periods, markets flood with fresh produce, yet prices crash. Farmers, desperate to avoid complete loss, offload tomatoes, peppers, and maize at giveaway prices. Much of the excess spoils before it finds buyers, sometimes dumped at farm gates or roadside heaps.
The national buffer stock system, meant to stabilize these cycles, is itself struggling. Many of its warehouses lack proper ventilation, basic temperature control, and maintenance, making them unfit to absorb the expected surpluses.
But the challenge isn’t just national. Ghana’s post-harvest problem extends into its homes. “Municipal waste in Ghana is made up of about 40% food,” Dr. Ackah shared.
He sees this as both a waste management concern and a missed opportunity. In other countries, home-level preservation, drying, freezing, and canning is second nature. In Ghana, even farmers with surplus produce often lack knowledge of how to store it for future use.
Dr. Ackah illustrated this with a simple example: he once froze corn for eight months, and it still tasted fresh. Yet most Ghanaians don’t know this is possible, let alone how to do it safely.
To fix this, he argues, we need more than just policy; we need innovation and grassroots solutions. The private sector, he says, must step into the gap. But not with massive factories. What’s urgently needed are micro-scale preservation services, a person in a community with a compact canning or bottling machine, or small businesses offering drying and packaging for farmers.
Even access to simple mason jars, common in other countries for food storage, could go a long way. Unfortunately, these tools are scarcely available locally, if at all.
With the mid-year budget review expected on July 24, he’s also calling for urgent attention to agriculture. The government’s plans, he concedes, are good, on paper. But the funding remains thin, and timing is even worse.
“If the funds don’t come before the season starts, then even well-intentioned policies won’t change anything this year,” he said. Most interventions are rolled out when the rains are nearly over or when crops are already in harvest. By then, it’s too late.
