Seeds of Opportunity: Empowering  the youth to turn agriculture into opportunity

By Stephen Nyamador Ghana spends GH₵760 million every year importing tomatoes. Read that again. In a country where the sun shines generously, there is an abundance of arable land and the availability of water, we pay three-quarters of a billion cedis annually to Burkina Faso and China for a fruit we can grow at home. At the same time, 45% of the tomatoes Ghanaian farmers actually produce about GH₵250 million worth, rot in fields and on roadsides because we lack the infrastructure to store and process them (Etefe 2026). This is not a farming problem. It is a business failure. And fixing it could be the single largest youth employment opportunity in Ghana today . A GH₵5.7bn hole in our economy. The numbers, compiled by the Chamber of Agribusiness Ghana, are sobering. Ghana is the world’s second-largest importer of tomato paste after Germany. Only seven percent of tomato paste sold here is actually made from Ghanaian tomatoes; the rest is imported bulk paste, repackaged and branded. ...