By the time a tuber of yam moves from a farm in northern Ghana to a consumer in Accra, its price can increase several times, highlighting the significant role transportation and logistics play in the country’s food pricing chain.
At the farmgate, farmers in areas such as Kpandai can sell several large tubers of yam for relatively low prices. However, the same produce can command significantly higher prices in major urban markets such as Makola and Agbogbloshie after travelling hundreds of kilometres to reach consumers.
The difference is not necessarily created at the farm level. A substantial portion of the final price reflects the cost of moving agricultural produce from remote farming communities to major consumption centres.
Transport operators must factor fuel, vehicle maintenance, driver costs, loading and unloading charges and other operating expenses into freight rates. For traders moving produce over long distances, these costs ultimately become part of the price paid by consumers.
In some farming communities, farmers must first transport their produce over poorly maintained or unpaved roads before reaching major highways. Difficult road conditions can increase travel times, damage vehicles and raise maintenance costs for transport operators.
Produce such as tomatoes, plantain and other fresh foods can deteriorate when transportation takes too long or when adequate storage facilities are unavailable. Traders then have to recover part of the value lost through spoilage from the produce that reaches the market, contributing to higher retail prices.
This means that improving food affordability requires attention not only to agricultural production but also to what happens after crops leave the farm.
Road investments remain important because reliable feeder roads can connect farming communities to highways and markets, reduce travel times and lower vehicle operating costs. But roads alone may not be sufficient to address the cost of moving large volumes of agricultural commodities across the country.
A more integrated transport system involving roads, rail and inland waterways could provide additional options for moving bulk agricultural products over long distances.
Rail transport, where available and commercially viable, could handle large volumes of cargo over long distances while reducing the number of heavy trucks required on major highways. Inland water transport could also provide another channel for moving suitable agricultural commodities, particularly where production centres can be efficiently connected to the Volta Lake and other navigable routes.
Ghana would also need supporting logistics infrastructure, including aggregation centres, warehouses, cold-storage facilities, loading terminals and efficient connections between farms, roads, railways, ports and urban markets.
Such infrastructure would allow produce to be consolidated closer to farming communities, transported in larger and more efficient quantities and stored under appropriate conditions before reaching consumers.
For farmers, better logistics could mean access to more markets and reduced losses after harvest. For traders, it could lower transportation and handling costs. For consumers, it could help reduce some of the costs built into food prices between the farmgate and the retail market.
The journey of a yam from northern Ghana to Accra therefore illustrates a broader challenge facing the country’s food economy: producing more food is only part of the solution.
How efficiently that food is transported, stored and distributed can be just as important in determining what farmers earn and what consumers eventually pay.
