The Minister for Food and Agriculture, Eric Opoku, has assured Ghanaians that government interventions to boost local tomato production will begin yielding visible results within the next three to four months, significantly reducing the country’s dependence on imported tomatoes.
He said the government had rolled out measures aimed at increasing domestic production and cutting imports, particularly from neighbouring Burkina Faso.
“We have started working on that challenge, and we are bent on reversing that story. Within the next three or four months, the results will be out there for Ghanaians to testify,” he said.
Mr Opoku made the remarks while appearing before Parliament’s Select Committee on Assurances to provide updates on commitments made by President John Dramani Mahama during the 2025 State of the Nation Address (SONA).
He explained that the government was investing in irrigation infrastructure, including the construction of solar-powered boreholes, to support year-round tomato cultivation in major farming communities across the country.
According to the Minister, ongoing interventions include drilling boreholes, installing solar-powered irrigation systems and fencing farms in areas prone to livestock intrusion to protect crops. He added that irrigation projects were already underway in several tomato-producing areas.
“President Mahama himself has taken special interest in this, and he says that we should bring an end to the importation of tomatoes into this country, and we’ll do just that,” he stated.
Farmers facing pressure from falling food prices
Responding to concerns raised by the Chairman of the Committee, Dominic Nitiwul, over the impact of declining food prices on farmers’ incomes, Mr Opoku acknowledged that while consumers were benefiting from lower prices, many farmers were struggling to recover their production costs.
He described the situation as what agricultural economists refer to as a “good-bad” scenario, where increased food production benefits consumers through lower prices but reduces farmers’ earnings because of excess supply.
“The bad-good is when there is a shortage of food in the system, like we witnessed in 2024 because of the dry spell. Then food prices started going up. A lot of people were pushed into abject poverty because of the rising food prices.
“But the farmers who were able to produce little made a lot of money because of the rising prices. So, for the farmers, it was good, but for the nation, it was bad. Now we find ourselves as a nation in this situation. I am a farmer. I am suffering. But the nation is the beneficiary,” he said.
To mitigate the impact on farmers, Mr Opoku disclosed that the government had submitted proposals to President Mahama and Cabinet to provide support for producers affected by falling prices.
As part of the immediate interventions, he said the government had approved the provision of free fertiliser to help farmers reduce production costs while longer-term measures focus on expanding agro-processing, strengthening value addition and creating reliable markets for agricultural produce.
He cautioned that sustained low prices without adequate support could discourage farmers from continuing production, stressing the need to develop processing capacity to absorb surplus produce and ensure stable incomes for producers.
