The agricultural sector took centre stage in Ghana’s economic and policy discourse through two key public events, the Citi Business Forum and Channel One TV’s AgriFair and a significant international investment announcement supporting the cocoa sector.
From upstream production to downstream processing and market access, there was a shift from narrow interventions to full value chain thinking. The Citi Business Forum and Channel One TV’s AgriFair both provided platforms for multi-stakeholder discussions around agriculture, conversations centred on boosting productivity through better inputs, mechanization, and extension services, improving credit access by de-risking the sector for financial institutions, increasing public and private financing, particularly for agribusinesses and post-harvest infrastructure, promoting agro-processing and value addition, to reduce post-harvest losses and enhance export potential, strengthening agriculture research and extension, which remain weak links in Ghana’s productivity challenge and facilitating better marketing and distribution systems.
Collectively, these discussions reflected a shift: agriculture was being treated less as a rural welfare issue and more as a strategic sector for job creation, industrialisation, and trade competitiveness. Despite agriculture’s importance to Ghana’s GDP, the sector continues to receive less than 5% of formal banking sector credit. Even more striking, from 2018 to 2024, agriculture attracted an average of less than 2% of total Foreign Direct Investment (FDI). These numbers highlight a structural underinvestment in the sector, despite years of policy pronouncements. The Citi Forum and AgriFair was right in framing the issue holistically, from input supply and research through processing, marketing, and exports. That’s the thinking Ghana needs if the sector is to become both commercially viable and socially transformative. But these ideas must move beyond forum panels. They need to be codified into sustained national policy with cross-ministerial coordination, better budget prioritization, and active support for agro-industrial ecosystems.
Alongside the broader policy conversations on agriculture, there was a significant development in Ghana’s cocoa sector. The International Finance Corporation (IFC) and Societe Generale Ghana (SG Ghana) announced a $40 million facility aimed at expanding access to finance within the cocoa value chain. The risk-sharing facility is expected to unlock up to $80 million in financing for Licensed Buying Companies (LBCs) to purchase cocoa directly from farmers, with the overall target of reaching 75,000 smallholder farmers and facilitating more sustainable, traceable cocoa trade over the next four years.
This is a positive intervention. One of the recurring challenges raised in Ghana’s agricultural sector is the difficulty of accessing finance, especially for actors along the value chain. Support of this nature can ease seasonal liquidity constraints, strengthen LBCs, and potentially improve cashflow to farmers. However, financing alone won’t be enough. The state of Ghana’s cocoa sector today reflects multiple, overlapping challenges that must also be addressed. Farmer morale is low, the average cocoa farmer is over 45 years old, and only 4% of farmers are under 35. Many younger people are unwilling to go into cocoa farming due to low returns, high input costs, and growing competition from illegal mining and urban alternatives. Farming lands are under threat. The steady encroachment of illegal mining (galamsey) is shrinking the land available for cocoa cultivation and degrading its productivity. Without stronger land governance and community protections, the production base of Ghana’s cocoa sector will continue to erode. Local processors are struggling to get beans.
As Bright Simons has highlighted , Ghana’s processing capacity is underutilized; some factories operate at just 10–40% of capacity, and others have had to import cocoa just to stay running. This is due to the fact that cocoa supplies are tightly controlled, with COCOBOD prioritizing forward exports to earn foreign exchange. While understandable, this trade model often leaves local processors and chocolate makers without access to raw materials, undermining Ghana’s goal of boosting domestic value addition. These challenges are not separate from the financing agenda, they are what shape whether financing will be impactful or not. If farmers are leaving the sector, lands are being lost to mining, and processors can’t get reliable supply, then improving access to credit, while necessary, will only treat one piece of a much larger puzzle.
This is why the cocoa sector must be considered within the larger vision of agricultural revitalisation that was echoed throughout the Citi Business Foru. Improvingg production is not enough. The entire agricultural value chain, from research and inputs to finance, processing, marketing, and export must be strengthened in an integrated way. The $40 million partnership with IFC and SG Ghana can support that effort. But it must be matched by policy reforms that make local cocoa sourcing more predictable, pricing and contract mechanisms that allow both farmers and processors to benefit from high global prices, and youth strategies that protect cocoa-growing areas and attract new farmers into the sector.
Credit: IMANI’s Criticality Analysis of Economic Issues-June 16-20, 2025.
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