Ghana must place science, technology and innovation at the heart of its Feed Ghana agenda to reduce food imports, increase agricultural productivity and safeguard strategic crops from climate-related threats, pests and diseases, officials of the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) have said.
The CSIR said tomato and ginger had emerged as critical test cases, with growing demand, low domestic production, post-harvest losses and disease outbreaks exposing persistent weaknesses in Ghana’s food production system.
The call was made during the second session of the 2026 Ministry of Environment, Science, Technology and Innovation (MESTI) Visibility Webinar Series, held virtually on the theme: “CSIR’s Interventions on Tomato and Ginger.”
Prof. Mrs Marian Quain, Deputy Director-General of the CSIR, said the Council had been tasked from July to lead the Ministry’s visibility webinar series to showcase its research interventions and their contribution to national development.
She said while flooding was the focus of the July 22 session, tomato and ginger were selected for the second session because of their strategic importance to Ghana’s food security and import substitution agenda.
The webinar, she said, provided an opportunity for CSIR institutes to share research interventions and collaborate with stakeholders across the agricultural value chain.
Prof. Quain said the initiative was aligned with the Government’s Feed Ghana Programme, an initiative of the Ministry of Food and Agriculture aimed at increasing agricultural productivity, strengthening food security, reducing imports and promoting value addition.
She said tomato and ginger production faced several challenges, including climate change, pests and diseases, declining soil fertility and significant post-harvest losses.
The CSIR, she said, was addressing some of those challenges through research undertaken by the Crop Research Institute (CSIR-CRI) and the Savannah Agricultural Research Institute (CSIR-SARI).
The interventions included climate-smart tomato breeding for both rainy and dry seasons, as well as improved production technologies for tomato and ginger.
Researchers at the webinar said Ghana’s annual demand for fresh and processed tomatoes exceeded 1.4 million metric tonnes, while domestic production supplied only about 15 to 18 per cent of that requirement.
That created a supply deficit of approximately 1.1 million tonnes, they said.
Fresh tomato imports, mainly from Burkina Faso, were estimated to cost Ghana about US$18 million annually, while processed tomato imports, largely sourced from China and Europe, amounted to about US$150 million in raw tomato equivalent.
The scientists said Ghana’s combined expenditure on tomato imports exceeded US$230 million annually, yet those imports met only about 40 percent of the supply gap.
Dr Michael Kwabena Osei, Principal Research Scientist and Vegetable Breeder at CSIR-CRI, said Ghana’s tomato production challenge was less about land availability and more about technology, quality seeds, irrigation and agronomic practices.
“A country that imports its seed will always import its food,” he said, noting that more than 85 per cent of tomato seeds planted in Ghana were imported commercial hybrid varieties.
Dr Osei said average tomato yields in Ghana remained between seven and 10 tonnes per hectare, although the use of improved varieties and appropriate management practices could raise yields to between 20 and 80 tonnes per hectare.
Ginger production, he said, faced an even more severe challenge following a bacterial wilt outbreak in 2022, which reduced national production to roughly 10 tonnes and left Ghana more than 99 per cent dependent on imports.
Dr Osei said addressing the challenges required “policy to protect, research to solve, and market to make profit.”
That, he said, would require stronger seed systems, climate-smart varieties, effective disease control, irrigation, processing facilities and stronger connections among researchers, farmers and markets.
Rev. Dr Cephas Adjei Mensah, Director of Research, Statistics and Information Management at MESTI, said tomato and ginger were central to Ghana’s food system, agribusiness sector and wider economy.
He said achieving the Feed Ghana Programme’s objectives of securing food supplies, increasing domestic production and reducing import dependence would require sustained investment in science, technology and innovation.
Rev. Dr Mensah commended researchers at CSIR-CRI and CSIR-SARI for their work and reaffirmed the Government’s commitment to strengthening Ghana’s research and innovation ecosystem.
