Ghana’s Ministry of Food and Agriculture (MoFA) has formalised a public-private partnership with agribusiness firm FarmMate Limited to scale domestic tomato production and cut the country’s annual tomato import bill, currently estimated at approximately USD 500 million.
The agreement, signed in Accra on Thursday, April 16, 2026, establishes a framework in which the government will provide policy support and coordination while FarmMate leads production, processing and value chain operations.
Under the agreement, FarmMate will, in collaboration with individual tomato farmers, cultivate 40,000 acres of the vegetable, with an output expectation of over 400,000 tonnes of fresh tomatoes. Supported by a 20 tonnes per hour processing plant, the deal is projected to deliver 200,000 tonnes of tomato puree annually, with pack houses, pre-processing centres, and logistics hubs across key farming zones. When fully operational, the agreement is expected to result in the production of 600,000 tonnes of fresh tomatoes annually.
Minister for Food and Agriculture Eric Opoku said the deal would address tomato price volatility and reduce losses during glut periods, adding that it is expected to create over 300,000 jobs along the value chain. As part of the government’s enabling role, Opoku said the Pwalugu tomato processing factory would be made available to FarmMate and that improved tomato seedlings had been procured and would be distributed to farmers nationwide.
FarmMate Chief Executive Sena Amevor put the scale of the challenge in stark terms. He said the country faces a supply deficit of nearly one million tonnes during the lean season between December and July, despite experiencing post-harvest losses of about 150,000 tonnes during peak production periods due to limited processing and storage capacity. He noted that the situation had been exacerbated by export restrictions from Burkina Faso, exposing structural weaknesses in Ghana’s tomato value chain.
Amevor said FarmMate and its partners would scale up processing facilities to handle up to 480 tonnes per day. He added that the company had been building its out-grower model across more than 60 farming communities since 2021, combining production with processing and distribution to ensure year-round supply.
Ghana’s tomato demand stands at around 800,000 metric tonnes annually, while domestic production has historically covered less than half that figure. The structural gap had long been bridged by imports, primarily from Burkina Faso, until that country formalised a ban on fresh tomato exports in March 2026 to protect its own processing industry.
The partnership builds on earlier collaboration between FarmMate and MoFA’s Food System Resilience Project (FSRP), which recorded a first-round harvest of 240 tonnes in the Upper East Region earlier this year under World Bank and Norwegian government funding.
