Leveraging the Potential of Ghana's Food System

Malnutrition—including undernutrition, micronutrient deficiencies, overweight, obesity, and diet-related non-communicable diseases (NCDs)—poses a staggering challenge to health, food security, and economic growth outcomes around the world. In Ghana, an estimated 256.1 million people experienced hunger and 240 million were undernourished in 2018. At the same time, rates of obesity and diet-related NCDs in the country have risen significantly—from just 10 percent of Ghanaian adults in 1993 to 40 percent in 2015. A recent IFPRI report, funded by the International Development Research Center, examines how a holistic food systems approach may provide the solution to Ghana’s double burden of malnutrition.

Ghana’s food system is dominated by traditional smallholder farmers, many of whom live in extreme poverty. These households account for 70 percent of the country’s farming population, and they tend to have weak market linkages, largely producing food for their own consumption. There are also slightly larger transitional markets, which consist mostly of informal sale of homemade pre-packaged snacks and beverages to the country’s growing population. Finally, Ghana’s small modern food system consists of industrial farms and retail markets and is characterized by more complex supply chains and higher quality processed foods. 

More fully modernizing Ghana’s food system by helping increase productivity and strengthen markets could help the country address both its food security and its economic needs, the report says—but only if that modernization is accompanied by a focus on healthy diets and environmental sustainability.  

Currently, Ghana’s food system—like many others around the world—faces a range of challenges that need to be collaboratively addressed in order to enable sustainable, equitable transformation.

• Poor diet quality/consumption of unhealthy foods. The average cost of a diet that meets guidelines for health is 283 percent of the average Ghanaian household’s food expenditure. The result is widespread micronutrient deficiencies and overall poor consumption patterns. Ghana relies on imports for many healthy foods, such as rice and animal-source foods, which has led to unattainably high prices for much of the population. In addition, as the country has become increasingly urbanized, consumption of unhealthy processed foods has increased. This trend, combined with the lack of availability and affordability of fresh nutritious foods, has led to rising overweight and obesity rates in both adults and children, particularly in urban areas.  
•  Climate shocks and low environmental resilience. Ghana relies heavily on the agricultural sector, which employs about half of the country’s work force; however, Ghanaian agriculture remains mostly rain-fed and dominated by subsistence farmers with little access to climate-smart production technologies and practices. As a result, Ghana is particularly vulnerable to the impacts of climate change and extreme weather events. In addition, agriculture itself is a large driver of climate change in the country: Ghana’s greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture increased by 67 percent between 1990 and 2016.
• Limited infrastructure. Smallholder farmers throughout Ghana have limited access to transportation and supply chain infrastructure and markets, leading to a gap of 169 percent between farmgate and wholesale prices. Post-harvest losses for cereals could be as much as 70 percent, while losses of fruits and vegetables, roots and tubers, grains, and legumes are around 20-30 percent annually.
• Significant regional discrepancies in livelihoods and food security outcomes. Northern rural Ghana experiences much higher food insecurity and child stunting rates, as well as lower diet quality and supply of both macro and micronutrients, than urban areas in the southern part of the country. Rural northern areas also tend to see higher food prices due to unpredictable precipitation and lower household purchasing power.

There exist high discrepancies between northern rural areas and southern urban areas, with the north experiencing large inequalities in livelihoods. Rural northern Ghana has higher food insecurity and stunting rates, with average stunting rates exceeding 20% (GSS et al., 2015; WFP/JAK, 2017). The northern Ghana is characterised by lower diet quality and supply of macro and micronutrients, with lower consumption of fruits and vegetables (LEAP, GSFP). The high cost of a healthy diet in the north is due to unpredictable rainfall patterns and low purchasing power owing to income inequalities (WFP, 2012). Ghana needs to increase the focus in the northern & rural regions to improve livelihoods and inequalities. To bridge the gap by further developing food systems in the northern regions, Ghana can achieve the ambition of less than 5% undernourishment rate by 2025. The food systems development results in more equitable livelihoods across the country, reduced income inequalities and healthier and nourished population.

The report provides several policy recommendations to tackle these challenges more effectively through a multi-sectoral food systems approach.

First, nutrition-sensitive agricultural production can be enhanced by providing high-nutrient seed varieties through government interventions, as well as by subsiding inputs for the production of healthy foods like fruits and vegetables and encouraging the production of nutrient-rich indigenous foods. Investments also need to be made in expanding district-level markets to increase small farmers’ access and in strengthening value-added agro-businesses to help farmers move out of subsistence agriculture.

In addition to incentivizing the production of healthy foods, the consumption of healthy diets particularly in urban areas, can be encouraged through improved and expanded nutrition education campaigns, as well as by ensuring the provision of healthy foods through the Ghana School Feeding Program.  Policymakers may also want to consider taxation of unhealthy foods and beverages, as well as more stringent nutrition labeling requirements.

To enhance resilience to climate-related shocks, policymakers need to enable the adoption of more sustainable resource management practices across a swathe of fields, including mining, logging, agroforestry, and irrigation. Investment in capacity-building and early warning technologies is also needed to help farmers and other food system actors better understand Ghana’s soil and climate conditions and prepare for climate-related shocks.

Infrastructure limitations can be addressed by prioritizing interventions that address post-harvest food loss, including reallocating funding to these projects. Increasing farmers’ access to credit can also help create better market linkages, as can forming infrastructure-focused public-private partnerships to leverage private sector investments.

Ghana’s food system holds the potential to drive significant nutrition, food security, and economic advancements. Taking advantage of this potential will require increased collaboration across government agencies and with both the private sector and smallholder farmers.

Sara Gustafson is a freelance communications consultant.