Accra, September 29, 2025
At the Kempinski Hotel yesterday, Ghana’s policymakers, farmers, processors, academics, and international partners gathered under one roof to confront a pressing question: how can Ghana make its cashew and oil palm sectors globally competitive in an era of tightening trade rules and sustainability demands?
The event, titled the Policy Dialogue on Cashew and Oil Palm Value Chains, was organized under the Ghana Private Sector Competitiveness Program II (GPSCP II), a bilateral initiative of the Government of Ghana and Switzerland’s State Secretariat for Economic Affairs (SECO). It was held in collaboration with the Tree Crops Development Authority (TCDA), the institution mandated to oversee the development of Ghana’s six tree crops of industrial importance.
The theme of the dialogue “Strengthening Governance and Competitiveness in Ghana’s Cashew and Oil Palm Value Chains” reflected the urgency of the challenge. Both crops support hundreds of thousands of smallholder farmers and generate crucial foreign exchange. Cashew alone now brings in over USD 400 million annually, while oil palm remains an indispensable source of food and raw materials for the domestic industry. Yet both sectors remain plagued by familiar constraints: overlapping mandates, weak enforcement of regulations, low farm productivity, chronic underinvestment in processing, and exposure to illegal imports that undermine local markets.
Delivering the keynote address on behalf of the Hon. Eric Opoku, Minister for Food and Agriculture, the Ministry’s Chief Director placed the conversation in stark terms. Ghana, he said, is at an inflection point.
“We are at a crossroads,” he told the audience. “We either strengthen the institutions that govern cashew and oil palm now, or we consign our farmers to being price-takers in a global market where sustainability and compliance increasingly dictate who participates.”
The Minister’s address laid out a candid diagnosis of the problems facing the two value chains. For oil palm, the major hurdles include low on-farm productivity, illegal importation of palm oil and vegetable oils, and weak enforcement of regulatory standards. For cashew, the concerns are somewhat different, high export of raw nuts with little value addition at home, fragmented farmer organizations, and insufficient financing for smallholder production.
He also highlighted that the challenges are not simply technical, but institutional and political. Multiple agencies currently share overlapping authority, from the Ministry of Trade and Industry to the Ministry of Food and Agriculture and allied regulatory bodies. This creates inefficiencies, slows decision-making, and undermines investor confidence.
Still, the Minister struck an optimistic note, stressing that reforms are already underway. The government’s strategy, he explained, is to empower the TCDA as the apex regulator with clearer coordination mandates. Investments are being directed toward seed certification, farmer training, and research-to-farm linkages, while new initiatives are exploring opportunities for scaling up processing and value addition.
“Policy must not be developed in silos,” he cautioned. “It must be inclusive, evidence-driven, and harmonized across institutions. Cashew and oil palm are not simply commodities; they are lifelines for our people, and engines for rural transformation.”
If the Minister’s keynote provided the framing, the release of the Policy and Institutional Mapping Report commissioned by GPSCP II and presented by Taylor Crabbe Initiative provided the hard data.
The report’s conclusions were blunt without sweeping reforms, Ghana risks being left behind in a rapidly changing global trade landscape. The European Union’s deforestation regulation (EUDR) will soon require exporters to prove traceability and sustainability, or risk exclusion from the EU market. Meanwhile, the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) offers enormous opportunities to position Ghana as a hub for regional trade but only if the country can consolidate its fragmented institutions and strengthen its regulatory regime.
The policy dialogue itself was designed as more than a ceremonial event. It was structured to force difficult conversations.
Breakout sessions were convened around four thematic clusters:
- Institutional coordination and regulatory enforcement
- Investment and financing for value addition
- Sustainability and compliance with international market standards
- Farmer livelihoods and competitiveness under AfCFTA
The project provided framing on how to sequence reforms, while the Taylor Crabbe team unpacked the institutional mapping study. The mood, several participants observed, was frank bordering on restless. Everyone in the room seemed to acknowledge that the cashew and oil palm sectors, long touted as potential engines of Ghana’s rural transformation, had been held back by inertia, turf wars, and chronic underinvestment.
By the end of the day, the dialogue had produced a tentative roadmap for reform. Key priorities included:
- Streamlining mandates under TCDA to reduce duplication and improve accountability.
- Scaling up local processing capacity to reduce dependence on raw exports, especially for cashew.
- Strengthening enforcement against illegal imports that undercut domestic oil palm producers.
- Mobilizing private investment into processing and value addition through blended finance mechanisms.
- Ensuring compliance with sustainability standards to keep Ghanaian products competitive in EU and other premium markets.
- Investing in farmer productivity through improved planting materials, training, and accessible finance.
Still, participants acknowledged that the hardest work lies ahead. Reforms agreed to in the halls of Kempinski will need to survive the grind of politics, bureaucratic turf battles, and the day-to-day realities of smallholder farmers.
As the Minister’s representative concluded: “We cannot continue business as usual. The cashew and oil palm sectors are at the heart of Ghana’s agricultural transformation agenda. This dialogue must be the beginning of sustained action to action that strengthens governance, supports our farmers, and positions Ghana as a leader in sustainable and competitive tree crop production.”
For now, the Policy Dialogue has set a marker. With stakeholders from government, industry, and development partners aligned on the urgency of reform, the challenge will be in execution.
The next twelve months will be critical. Delivering on the commitments made will determine whether Ghana can seize the opportunities of AfCFTA, comply with evolving EU regulations, and finally unlock the potential of cashew and oil palm as engines of inclusive growth.
The Kempinski meeting may be remembered as a turning point, the moment when Ghana decided that its farmers, processors, and institutions deserved more than incremental fixes, and that the time had come for bold reform.
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