Ghana’s Trade Minister Elizabeth Ofosu-Adjare is pressing four specific demands at the World Trade Organization’s (WTO) 14th Ministerial Conference (MC14) in Yaoundé this week on food security, agricultural subsidies, digital trade and fisheries as the country uses the first WTO ministerial held in Africa since 2015 to defend the economic policy tools it says are essential to its development.
The four-day conference opened on Thursday, March 26 at the Palais des Congrès in Yaoundé, Cameroon, with ministers from all 166 WTO members gathering to take decisions on the organisation’s future work.
Ghana is among the most engaged African delegations at the talks. Ofosu-Adjare has been building toward this moment since at least December 2025, when she represented Ghana at an African ministerial retreat in Marrakech designed to lock in a common continental position ahead of the conference. At that meeting, she recalled that when the WTO was established in 1994, many African countries arrived as observers at the table, signing onto a system largely shaped by others’ priorities. The point was less historical than tactical: Ghana’s team has come to Yaoundé intent on changing that dynamic.
At the top of Ghana’s agenda is the unresolved dispute over public stockholding for food security, the right of governments to buy, store and release food to stabilise domestic prices. Under current WTO rules, such interventions can be classified as trade-distorting subsidies, exposing countries that use them to legal challenge. Ghana, which has faced recurring food inflation and supply disruptions, regards the absence of a permanent solution as a direct constraint on its ability to protect consumers and smallholder farmers.
Closely linked is Ghana’s push to discipline the agricultural subsidies paid by advanced economies. Wealthy countries continue to support their farming sectors at levels that countries like Ghana cannot match, structurally undercutting local producers even before productivity differences are considered. Ghana’s negotiators have argued that liberalised agricultural markets without corresponding subsidy reform effectively lock developing countries into import dependence.
On industrial policy, Ghana is defending Special and Differential Treatment (SDT) provisions that give developing countries flexibility to use tariffs, subsidies and local content rules in pursuit of industrialisation. Reform discussions at MC14 have included proposals to tighten disciplines around exactly these instruments, creating a tension between WTO reform and the development policy space that Ghana and other African nations say they need.
Ghana is also watching the digital trade negotiations carefully. The moratorium preventing WTO members from imposing customs duties on electronic transmissions expires at MC14, forcing a decision on whether to extend it, allow it to lapse, or make it permanent. Ghana supports digital trade facilitation but has flagged concerns that emerging rules on data flows and platform regulation could limit its ability to nurture a domestic digital economy.
On fisheries, Ghana’s position seeks to distinguish between industrial-scale subsidies that drive stock depletion and targeted support that sustains the livelihoods of small-scale coastal fishing communities, many of whom have faced escalating attacks at sea in the Gulf of Guinea.
On the sidelines of the formal negotiations, Ofosu-Adjare is expected to hold bilateral meetings with counterparts from China, India and Türkiye, engagements that Ghana regards as equally consequential given the pace at which multilateral negotiations have historically moved.
MC14 marks only the second time a WTO Ministerial Conference has been held on the African continent, following the Nairobi session in 2015. NewsGhana reported on the conference’s opening session on Thursday.
