By Charles Mensah | Development Communications Consultant, Mech Consult Ltd
In 1985, Vietnam could not feed itself. Food production had been declining under the collective farming structures inherited from the post-reunification socialist agricultural model, and the country faced recurring food shortages. Rice, the staple food that formed the foundation of the Vietnamese diet and the labour of millions of rural households, was imported to cover domestic shortfalls.
By 1989, four years after agricultural reforms began, Vietnam exported 1.4 million tonnes of rice, making it the world’s third-largest exporter. By 2023, Vietnam exported approximately 8.1 million tonnes of rice, valued at $4.7 billion, placing it among the world’s top three exporters, behind India and Thailand. By 2025, it had overtaken Thailand to become the second-largest rice exporter globally.
Ghana has more arable land than Vietnam. Its climate supports rice cultivation across the Volta Region, the Ashanti floodplains and the northern agricultural zones. It has a longer formal agricultural history and more established rural infrastructure than Vietnam had in 1985. Every year, Ghana imports millions of dollars’ worth of rice that its agricultural capacity should produce.
The usual explanation for this paradox is not agricultural. It is a structural governance system that cannot sustain agricultural support long enough for domestic production to reach a competitive scale. With the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) operational, the cost of this governance failure is no longer a domestic food security issue. It is a question of whether Ghana can build the manufacturing and agro-processing base it needs to compete in its own region.
The AfCFTA Movement
The African Continental Free Trade Area entered into force in May 2019 and began trading in January 2021. 54 African Union member states have signed the agreement, representing more than 1.4 billion people and a combined GDP exceeding $3.4 trillion. The AfCFTA Secretariat’s modelling projects that full implementation would increase intra-African trade by more than 50 per cent and lift 40 million people out of extreme poverty by 2035.
Ghana is well placed within this framework. Accra hosts the AfCFTA Secretariat, and Ghana’s port infrastructure provides a gateway to the landlocked economies of the Sahel region. The country has trade relationships across the continent and a private sector with the expertise and experience to capitalise on expanded regional markets.
However, positioning is not readiness. For Ghana to benefit meaningfully from the AfCFTA, it needs a manufacturing and agro-processing base capable of producing goods suitable for trade at the regional scale. Building that base requires exactly what Ghana’s governance system has consistently failed to provide: sustained, multi-year investment in the agricultural and industrial supply chains on which processing industries depend.
Lessons from Komenda Sugar Factory
The Komenda Sugar Factory in the Central Region stands as perhaps the most concise illustration of Ghana’s agro-processing governance failure. Built at a cost of $35 million, with part of the funding provided through Indian government credit support, the factory was commissioned in 2016 to process locally grown sugarcane into refined sugar and reduce Ghana’s annual sugar import bill.
The factory was built and processed some cane. It then stalled, not because of engineering failure but because the agricultural supply system it depended on was never developed. The irrigated cane fields, contract farming arrangements, cane transport infrastructure and farmer technical support programmes needed to supply the factory at viable capacity were not built in parallel with the processing facility. The processing capacity existed. The agricultural system it required did not.
The Komenda story is not an anomaly. Ghana has tomato-processing facilities operating below capacity because the domestic supply is inconsistent and seasonal. It has fruit-juice-processing operations that depend on imported raw materials because the local supply chain has not been stabilised. Its poultry-processing capacity sits underused while poultry products are imported at scale. The Ministry of Food and Agriculture’s own data estimates that around 40 per cent of Ghana’s agricultural output is lost annually to post-harvest losses, with produce spoiling between farm and market because the cold chain, storage, and processing infrastructure to handle it consistently have not been built.
In each case, the same pattern repeats. A processing investment is made, and the agricultural infrastructure investment needed to make it viable is delayed as priorities shift. The next administration inherits an underperforming facility and makes its own announcement. The processing investment is made, and the agricultural infrastructure investment becomes a casualty of the transition.
“Every year, Ghana continues to import food it can grow. This reflects a structural choice driven by a governance system unable to sustain agricultural investment long enough for domestic production to reach a competitive scale. Changing that governance system is the first step.”
The $3.25 Billion Annual Bill for Ghana
The Ghana Statistical Service estimates the country’s annual food import bill at over $3.25 billion. This comprises rice, poultry, processed cereal grains, vegetable oils, sugar and wheat, all of which Ghana’s agricultural capacity could produce at a competitive scale if that capacity received sustained, multi-year support.
The African Union’s Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Programme Biennial Review Report has consistently rated Ghana’s progress in reducing dependence on food imports as off track. Ghana has committed to both the Maputo Declaration, which obligates governments to allocate at least 10 per cent of the national budget to agriculture and rural development, and the Malabo Declaration on accelerated agricultural transformation by 2025. Available data indicate that these commitments have been inconsistent across administrations. World Bank reviews of Ghana’s agricultural spending have found it heavily skewed towards recurrent expenditure and short-term subsidy (political) programmes, with insufficient allocation to the infrastructure, research and market development that long-term production competitiveness requires.
This is not an indictment of any government’s agricultural ambition. Every administration since 1993 has articulated some version of the agricultural transformation agenda. The problem is structural. Agricultural policy resets every four years. A smallholder farmer who adopted a new crop variety under an extension programme discontinued with a change of administration will not readily adopt the next programme recommended by the incoming government. Trust erodes, adoption rates fall, and supply chains never stabilise. The base for the AfCFTA’s agro-processing never gets built.
The Vietnamese Model: Continuity as Agricultural Policy
Vietnam’s Doi Moi (renovation) economic reforms, launched at the Vietnamese Communist Party’s Sixth National Congress in December 1986, mark one of the most dramatic agricultural transformations in modern economic history. The central agricultural reform, Directive 10 (khoán 10) of 1988, officially recognised the individual peasant household as an independent economic unit, dismantled the failing collective farming system, and granted households land-use rights for 15 years, later extended to 20 years and beyond. Farmers could invest in their land, respond to market signals, and choose their crops.
Land reform alone did not drive Vietnam’s transformation in rice exports. Across multiple leadership transitions, what accompanied it was the crucial governance element: sustained state investment in irrigation infrastructure across the Mekong Delta and Red River Delta agricultural zones; improved development and distribution of rice varieties through the Vietnamese Academy of Agricultural Sciences; rural road construction connecting farming communities to markets and processing facilities; extension service networks consistently reaching farming households; and a sustained partnership with the International Rice Research Institute that produced crop varieties adapted to Vietnam’s specific ecological conditions.
The state, institutionally integrated rather than dependent on any individual leader, decided that agricultural development was a non-negotiable national priority. That decision endured changes in party leadership because it was embedded in the state’s planning framework rather than in any leader’s personal commitments. Investment decisions made in the late 1980s produced agricultural supply systems that reached full competitive capacity by the mid-1990s. Institutional continuity safeguarded the long-term agricultural investment plan through leadership transitions.
Vietnam’s transformation did not require a particular political system. It required planning, continuity and institutional commitment to sustain agricultural investment long enough to build the supply systems that processing industries and export markets require. That commitment is available to any governance system that chooses to build it.
The Agricultural Framework Ghana Needs
Ghana needs Vietnam’s institutional commitment to planning continuity, applied specifically to the agricultural supply chains on which its agro-processing ambitions and its AfCFTA positioning depend.
A binding National Development Planning Commission agricultural framework, enshrined in the 40-year plan’s economic transformation dimension, would set specific import-substitution targets for rice, poultry, tomato products, and sugar, and establish legally enforceable investment milestones for irrigation, cold-chain infrastructure, and processing capacity. The Planting for Food and Jobs programme and its equivalents under successive administrations have demonstrated that both the technical capacity and smallholder willingness to engage with agricultural support programmes exist. What has been missing is the institutional commitment to sustain those programmes across administrations.
A constitutionally guaranteed research budget for the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research’s agricultural science institutes, modelled on the sustained investment in the Empresa Brasileira de Pesquisa Agropecuaria (EMBRAPA) that underpinned Brazil’s agricultural transformation, would end the cycle of scientific capacity being quietly underfunded when fiscal conditions deteriorate. A National Agricultural Supply Chain Fund, structured as a statutory transfer beyond annual budgetary discretion, would provide the multi-year support that smallholder supply stabilisation requires before agro-processing investment becomes viable.
The AfCFTA Secretariat is in Accra. The continent’s most ambitious free trade framework is operational. Ghana has the land, water, agricultural knowledge base, and private-sector capability to build a regional agro-industrial economy. What it brings to the AfCFTA table and what it fails to bring will be determined not by the ambition of its declarations but by the governance of its supply chains.
The $3.25 billion food import bill is more than an economic statistic. It is a governance report card. It tells Ghana and its trading partners within the AfCFTA framework that a country with extraordinary agricultural potential is, through institutional design, choosing not to realise its potential. Ghana can write a new future. The legislative tools to do so are available, achievable and long overdue.
