In the sweltering heat of the Tudu market in Accra, Pastor Bernice Mawushi Thevo shelters under the shade of a high rise building in the early evening to sell tomatoes. It is Monday afternoon and her fruits are already three days old and now spoiling.
While picking the spoilt ones from her stock, she explained that “the tomatoes are not strong nowadays. Because it will spoil quickly, that’s why you don’t take too much”.
She doesn’t have access to a cold store, refrigerator or a processing facility to offload her modest stock, which cannot stay another day. She said she only buys what she can sell a day, not because there’s no demand but for fear of incurring irrecoverable loses.
“When we take much, they don’t buy it. By the following day, it will spoil,” she added.
The distance from Accra to Ouahigouya, in Burkina Faso – where the fruit is sourced predominantly, is over 1,159 kilometres on road, spanning over 20 hours 35 minutes, according to Google Maps. However, importers revealed that it takes more than two and a half days – about 50 hours – to get there due to poor road network, traffic and delays at immigration checks. By the time the fruit gets to the market in Accra, its shelf-life would have ended.
“We count the days. Five days you have to be in Accra. So when you spend an extra day, then you have lost a lot of money. A lot of money,” David Podu, a tomato importer, said.
Ripe tomatoes retain best eating quality for 2 to 3 days at room temperature, according to the University of California Division of Agriculture and Natural Resources. It can be stored for 2 to 5 days without refrigeration after it is picked, depending on the prevailing temperature and ventilation of the storage facility.
Beyond that, a ripening hormone called ethylene begins to build up quickly – eventually causing it to rot. However, with refrigeration, tomato can last for 2 to 3 weeks. More so, when turned into tomato puree it can last up to 2 years.
Meanwhile, some traders revealed that locally produced tomato, from Agogo, usually flood the market in July and subsequent months, with no capacity to store, pocess nor sell them. According to them, this deluge usually leads to drop in prices. However, due to lack of factories to process the excess, the farmers lose big time.
Tomato forms a major part of the Ghanaian cuisine but the reliance on only rain water for farming activities, post-harvest losses and lack of storage facilities and processing factories have turned the fruit into a “seasonal gold,” which hikes as high as only four pieces for GH¢20, in off seasons.
Research data shows that post harvest losses bedevil fruit and vegetables, with approximately 30-50 percent lost annually. The Chamber of Agribusiness Ghana estimates that some GH¢250million worth of locally produced tomatoes rot annually due to lack of cold storage, constituting some 45 percent of domestic production.
The chamber further revealed that approximately GH¢5.7billion is lost every year due to inefficiencies in the domestic tomato industry. These include import costs, tax revenue losses, post-harvest losses, wage losses and importers’ security cost.
The Business and Financial Times (B&FT) gathered that the tomato crisis doesn’t stem from only production deficit, as conveniently put, but a myriad of supply chain issues, including transport, preservation and storage.
David Podu imports fresh tomatoes from Burkina Faso. He described the tortuous journey to Ouahigouya to buy the fruit, which takes up to 5 days – from Accra to Burkina Faso and back. He noted that it has been over 35 years since this cross-border trade first started due to Ghana’s domestic tomato production decline.
Irrigation projects in the north, particularly the Tono and Vea dams, previously supplied a chunk of the nation’s tomatoes. However, due to lack of incentives and support for tomato farmers, the deteriorating road network and the continuous battle with huge post-harvest losses, farmers are now turning to less perishable and more lucrative crops like pepper, rice and garden eggs, leaving the country at the mercy of imports from Burkina Faso.
“It’s very painful. It’s a very big shame to Ghana that from independence up to this generation, we don’t have dams to farm tomatoes from January to May before the rainy seasons. It’s worrying. Ghana is bigger than Burkina Faso. How can they do that and we can’t?” he quizzed.
The Burkinabé Government has earlier announced intentions to restrict raw tomato exports to encourage local processing, launching two big tomato processing factories. This poses a threat to food security in Ghana, as a chunk of the fruit is imported from Burkina Faso.
Annual tomato imports hit GH¢760million, according to the CAG. This is spent importing fresh tomatoes in excess of 75,000 tonnes and 75,000 metric tonnes tomato paste every year.
Fresh tomato imports from Burkina Faso alone reached GH¢400million in 2022, according to Vegetable Producers and Exporters Association of Ghana.
However, the Burkinabé military government’s stringent enforcement of axle load regulations puts a strain on the cross-border trade, which – according to Mr. Podu – is already plagued with loses. “At first, it was almost 120 [boxes per truck], now it’s 100. They are forcing us to cut the car,” he explained.
According to the supplier, the Burkinabé Government also required them to reduce the sizes of the boxes in order to comply with the new rules, stating that it shrinks their profit margins, as they continue to absorb the same transport costs for reduced volumes.
The traders, therefore, called on government to intervene by revamping the irrigation dams across the country to ensure all-year-round tomato farming to reduce reliance on imports from Burkina Faso and Togo.
Ghana remains the largest tomato paste importer in Africa and globally second to Germany, according to data from CAG. The chamber estimates this leads to an annual loss of GH¢220million to uncollected income taxes, VAT and corporate tax from some 250,000 potential jobs that do not exist due to import reliance.
This year, the seasonal shortage that typically occur in June started early; and to top it up, Podu suggested the worst is yet to come.
This follows the killing of 7 tomato traders in Titao near Ouahigouya, where terrorists touched their truck, burning the victims beyond recognition. The incident left 11 others injured.
“The way they are killing us. We don’t want to go there,” Mr. Podu said.
He further alleged that Ghanaian traders are usually subjected to maltreatment in Burkina Faso, saying they are treated “like refugees,” facing hostility and disrespect.
No trips mean reduced supply. Reduced supply means the shortage will soon bite harder. Now, the continuity of this perilous cross-border trade lies in limbo.
“As we are talking now, our leaders have given an instruction that from Thursday, for one month, no car will go to Burkina Faso,” he said.
Another tomato trader, Hajaratu Abubakar, said the current price hike isn’t a fault of theirs but the supply constraints, revealing that she sometimes takes out a basket of spoiled tomatoes from a box. This she said further shrinks her profit margins.
“Before, the box was GH¢1,000. Now it’s GH¢4,000,” she revealed, insisting “it’s not our fault. In Burkina Faso, there’s shortage. In Togo too, shortage. That’s why it’s expensive.”
The Ghanaian Government has announced, time without number, plans to establish tomato processing factories, including revamping the Pwalugu tomato factory. It has acknowledged the irrigation problem, promising to construct 250 solar-powered mechanised boreholes across the country and revamp the major irrigation dams in the northern part of the country to ensure all-year-round farming. It has also discussed import restrictions to protect local industries.
But for Pastor Bernice, these are distant realities. She is worried about the tomatoes she bought on Saturday, which will not survive another day in the heat.
“God is able to help us to provide for our families,” she said, scanning for customers for the remainder of her modest stock.
In a functioning agrarian country, there won’t be any need to call on God to fix tomato production and supply chain issues. A functioning cold storage, proper irrigation and post-harvest loss mitigation would be sufficient.
In the absence of these, the country haemorrhages GH¢4.5billion each year to foreign farmers and processors, which could be earned by some 250,000 Ghanaians in wages, according to CAG.
With effective interventions, this hard currency could be retained to boost economic activity and growth.
