Market Intelligence

The clearest current read is the government’s own export scorecard. Ghana’s non-traditional exports reached about five billion dollars in 2025, up nearly 31 percent, with agricultural products worth some seven hundred and ten million, led by cashew at close to three hundred million and shea at a hundred and seventy-eight. Cassava, in any form, is nowhere in the top ten, and although it is named in a handful of regional profiles, it is a top earner in none and is formally classed as a potential product in just one region, Ahafo.¹ Figure 20 shows the company cassava does not keep.

This is not a failure of the crop; it is a statement about where cassava sits. Ghana grows enormous volumes and eats or trades almost all of it informally and at home (Pillars 2 and 6), so what leaves the country formally is tiny. Because the trade is so small, Ghana is also invisible in the market-intelligence services that track cassava worldwide: the authoritative Asian outlooks that cover Thailand, Vietnam and China in detail name Ghana only as a producer, with about 8 percent of world output, and treat African cassava as grown for home consumption rather than trade.²The few Ghanaian export prices that are tracked are so thin they swing from a dollar to more than four dollars a kilo inside five months, on a handful of transactions. Figure 21 shows what passes for a price signal.

Flying blind on price is itself a business risk. Until a regular export price series for cassava products exists, treat any single export quote as noise and price off the domestic and regional markets you can actually see.³

The sharpest market read runs against the export dream, and it is that the competition is already inside the house. Ghana is a net importer of cassava products, driven by ethanol, whose imports outweigh its tiny exports many times over, so for ethanol the sensible strategy is import substitution rather than export promotion.⁷The same pattern is now spreading to starch: Nigeria's cassava-starch exports grew from under a thousand tonnes in 2022 to more than two thousand six hundred in 2023, and about 2,300 tonnes of that 2023 total, close to nine-tenths, went to Ghana, moving duty-free under the ECOWAS trade regime, so a Ghanaian starch producer’s first competitor is a Nigerian mill already selling into Ghana, well ahead of any Asian supplier.⁸

That regime works in both directions, and reading it properly is where the strategy turns. It is the channel Nigerian starch and gari take to Ghanaian shelves, and it is the same duty-free door through which a Ghanaian processor reaches the roughly 350-million-person ECOWAS market, now twelve countries since Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger left in January 2025, free of import duty for goods registered under the ECOWAS Trade Liberalisation Scheme.⁹ So the market intelligence resolves to a sequence: the nearest and most defensible market is the demand imports already meet at home, and the first true export step is regional and duty-free, taken well before the tariffed, price-competitive global markets the crop is so often pointed at.