The head of the Chamber of Agribusiness Ghana (CAG) has called on government to build a national agricultural database that would reduce Ghana’s dangerous over-reliance on cross-border food sourcing, a practice that has now cost Ghanaian traders their lives following a deadly insurgent attack in Burkina Faso.
Chief Executive Officer of the Chamber, Anthony Morrison, said the absence of a coordinated agricultural information system leaves import permit authorities with no reliable basis for regulating approvals, and enables a recurring market distortion in which imported produce arrives on Ghanaian markets just as local farmers are harvesting, triggering price crashes and post-harvest losses that erode farmer incomes.
“We need an agriculture information database where we know how many farms are under production for each commodity,” he said. “If someone wants to import 50,000 tonnes, the system should indicate what quantities will soon be harvested locally so that such permits are not automatically approved.”
The call comes against the backdrop of a recent militant attack in Burkina Faso’s Loroum Province in which Ghanaian tomato traders and drivers were killed while travelling to source produce, making clear that the country’s food security is now dangerously tied to the regional security of its neighbours. Morrison described the incident as a wake-up call that demands an urgent policy response.
The Chamber has advocated the creation of such a database for more than a decade, arguing that production tracking would give authorities the tools to manage import permits in a way that complements domestic harvests rather than undermining them.
The database proposal forms part of a much larger vision the Chamber is advancing. CAG is proposing the Ghana National Agricultural Transformation Strategy (GNATS) for 2026 to 2045, backed by a 30 billion dollar investment plan to be mobilised from government, the private sector, development partners and innovative financing mechanisms. Morrison warned that no country has achieved genuine agricultural transformation through short-term programmes, and that successful agricultural economies are built on sustained commitment to long-term strategic frameworks maintained across political cycles for 15 to 30 years.
“We spend over 2.5 billion dollars annually importing food we could produce, our farmers remain poor, youth flee agriculture, and we lag behind countries that made long-term strategic commitments decades ago,” Morrison said. “The question is not whether Ghana can afford to develop a long-term agricultural strategy; it is whether we can afford not to.”
The Chamber maintains that a functioning agricultural data system would serve as the operational backbone of any such long-term strategy, enabling smarter planning, protecting farmers from market distortions, and keeping Ghanaian traders out of harm’s way by reducing the economic pressure that drives them into insecure border regions.
