Ahead of the 2025 budget presentation on Tuesday March 11, the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) is urging a strategic shift in government spending to reinvigorate Ghana’s agriculture sector.
The IFS contends that investing in local fertiliser production is essential to reversing the sector’s decline, from 26.9% of the nation’s GDP in 2010 to 22.7% in 2023 by ensuring farmers have a reliable and cost-effective supply of fertiliser.
At a press briefing, Dr. Said Boakye, Senior Research Fellow at the IFS, stressed that establishing additional fertiliser manufacturing plants could significantly boost agricultural productivity.
“We need to establish several fertiliser manufacturing plants to ensure that adequate and affordable fertiliser is available to farmers, which will help boost agricultural productivity,” Dr. Boakye stated.
He also expressed his disappointment over Ghana’s lack of a chemical fertiliser plant, contrasting the nation’s situation with Vietnam, which boasts over 7,000 such facilities.
“The sad reality is that Ghana lacks a single chemical fertiliser plant. In our rice studies, we have been comparing with Vietnam, where they have more than 7,000 plants. Vietnam’s success in achieving high agricultural productivity is largely due to fertilisers being readily available to farmers at no cost, along with incentivized prices,” he noted.
He further critiqued Ghana’s fertiliser distribution system, which depends heavily on imports and is frequently marred by political interference. Over the past years, locals often invade the offices of particularly DCEs and other local government offices with reason being that fertilisers which were meant for them to use freely, were kept by the authorities.
Data from africafertilizer.org reveals that Ghana does not engage in primary production of inorganic fertilisers; instead, fertilisers are imported in both compound and bulk forms. The bulk fertilisers are blended into various formulations and distributed through a network of distributors and retail agro-dealers. Moreover, the statistics show that fertiliser imports surged by 46% from 2019 to 2020, totaling 618,638 metric tonnes and 1,399,767 litres in 2020.
