Ghana Agribusiness Playbook← Marine Fisheries
Ghanaian canoes landing small pelagic fish at dawn, a purse-seine net coming ashore
Marine Fisheries · Pillar 01

Species and Stocks

Ghana has two marine fisheries in opposite conditions, and the first commercial decision is knowing which one you are in. Most of the 442,361 tonnes landed in 2024 were small pelagics, overfished every year since 2004; tuna, 28.5 per cent of 2023 landings, is healthy and MSC-certified.
Species and stocks · Pillar 01

Ghana has two marine fisheries in opposite conditions, and the first commercial decision here is knowing which one you are in. One feeds the country and is failing; the other earns the foreign exchange and is sound. Neither can be made bigger by any operator: the input is a shared stock with a ceiling, and for most of what Ghana eats that ceiling passed twenty years ago.

A line of painted wooden canoes drawn up on a Ghanaian beach at first light, crew hauling a purse-seine net of small pelagic fish ashore, documentary photograph
Two fisheries, one sea
The first decision: which fishery a proposal actually sits in.
425,424 t
marine fish landed in 2023, worth GH¢9.82 billion
~70%
of landings were small pelagics, 2015 to 2020 average: the fishery that is failing
28.5%
of 2023 landings were tuna, the healthy stocks

🐟 Two fisheries, one sea 🐟

Treat this as one industry and the business case fails. Ghana landed 425,424 tonnes of marine fish in 2023, worth GH¢9.82 billion at first sale: artisanal canoes 54.3 per cent, tuna 28.5, industrial trawl 12.5 and semi-industrial 4.7 on the table total (the report’s narrative gives 410,293 tonnes). The canoe fleet lands and earns the most, GH¢4.61 billion. Marine landings rose to an estimated 442,361 tonnes in 2024.1 The 2026 budget reports 384,076 tonnes for 2025, a figure published in November 2025 before the year closed.23

Table 2: Ghana's two marine fisheries, side by side
The small pelagic fisheryThe tuna fishery
What it isSardinella, anchovy, chub mackerel, taken close inshoreYellowfin, skipjack and bigeye, taken offshore
Who catches it11,583 canoes at the 2016 census, 12,175 in the preliminary 2022 surveyAn industrial fleet of purse seiners and pole-and-line vessels
Where it goesThe domestic plate, mostly smokedCanning at Tema, mostly for export to the United Kingdom and the European Union
Share by weightAbout 70 per cent of landings, 2015 to 2020 average28.5 per cent of landings in 2023
Share by valueGH¢4.61 billion for all canoe landings in 2023, the largest in total34.6 per cent of landed value, the highest per tonne
Stock conditionEvery assessed stock overfished and still being overfishedAll three stocks neither overfished nor subject to overfishing
The commercial questionHow to lose less of what is already landedHow to hold market access, and how long the bait lasts

Sources: Fisheries Commission; Lazar et al.; Cook et al.; International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas; Dovlo et al.; UN Comtrade for export destinations.345678

What this means.A proposal that says “Ghanaian fish” has not yet said anything bankable. The two fisheries carry different customers, capital and resource outlooks, so the due-diligence question gives opposite answers depending on which is in front of you. Settle that before market sizing.

🐟 The small pelagics: the fishery that feeds the country, and is failing 🐟

Small pelagics are the protein floor of Ghanaian diets, at 60 to 70 per cent of total marine landings on the Fisheries Commission’s estimate,9 cheap and, once smoked, storable without the refrigeration this chain largely lacks. Fish overall supplies between 50 and 80 per cent of the animal protein Ghanaians eat, with pelagic fish 71 per cent of total fish intake10.

Round sardinella landings fell from 119,515 tonnes in 1992 to 11,834 tonnes in 2019, 9.9 per cent of the historical maximum4. The combined small pelagic stock of sardinellas, anchovy and mackerels has sat in the overfished and still overfishing quadrant every year since 2004. The 2019 national assessment put its biomass at 54 per cent of the level that supports maximum sustainable yield (300,000 tonnes), with fishing mortality of 0.81 against a sustainable 0.4, removing about 65 per cent of the stock every year.4

The newer regional assessment, run in 2022 on data to 2021, rated the Ghana, Togo and Benin stocks of round sardinella, flat sardinella and anchovy as overexploited, with fishing mortality at 174, 334 and 163 per cent of the F0.1 target, and advised closing the flat sardinella and anchovy fisheries and, as a precaution, the round sardinella fishery.114

Round sardinella landings, the 1992 peak against 2019
Figure 1 Round sardinella landings, the 1992 peak against 2019
What this shows

The figure shows the two end points of an annual landings series: the source plots every year from 1990 to 2019 from Fisheries Commission data. Read it with the assessment verdict, because a stock can fall and flatten and still be in the red on both measures, which this one has been every year since 2004.

Women smoking small pelagic fish over traditional ovens at a Ghanaian landing beach, racks of round sardinella and anchovy, documentary photograph
The protein floor
Cheap and storable: the fishery feeding the country, once smoked.
9.9%
of its historical maximum: round sardinella's 2019 landing
0.81 vs 0.4
fishing mortality applied against the sustainable rate
A small woven basket holding a thin catch of round sardinella on wet sand at a Ghanaian landing beach, a fisherman's hand resting beside it
A thin catch
What 9.9 per cent of the historical maximum looks like in a basket.

What ‘overfished’ costs the person in the canoe

Artisanal catch per trip fell from 626 kg in 2022 to 454 kg in 2023, a 27 per cent drop in one year that the Fisheries Commission linked to warmer water in 2023.3 Over the longer run effort has risen: between the 1970s and 2015 purse seine nets grew from 275 metres to 800 metres and mesh fell from 2.5 cm to 0.5 cm, while the catch a canoe fell from 50 boxes of 30 kg to 10 under open access.4

Purse seine net length rising, mesh size falling, and catch a canoe falling, 1970s against 2015
Figure 2 More net, finer mesh, less fish: purse seine gear and catch a canoe, 1970s against 2015

Every one of these three movements is the right decision for one canoe owner and the wrong one for all of them together. A longer net with a finer mesh takes more of a shrinking stock today, including the juveniles that would have been next year’s catch, which is why the third panel falls as the first two rise. No operator can buy their way out of this with better gear.

Read this before planning a catching business. The stock cannot supply more small pelagic fish and the law is moving against the gear that would try, so the small pelagic opportunities sit after the landing, in losing less, grading, chilling, smoking cleanly and selling to someone who pays more. A shrinking raw supply raises the value of every point of loss recovered (Pillars 5 and 6).

A Ghanaian purse-seine crew hauling a long, fine-mesh net over the gunwale of a canoe, few fish visible in the catch, documentary photograph
454 kg
catch a trip in 2023, down from 626 kg in 2022
50 to 10
boxes of 30 kg landed a canoe, 1970s against 2015

🐟 The tuna: the healthy stocks 🐟

An industrial pole-and-line tuna vessel at Tema harbour, crew hauling skipjack tuna aboard, canning factory in the background, documentary photograph
The export earner
Sound and certified: all three tuna stocks in good standing.
121,297 t
tuna landed in 2023, worth GH¢3.40 billion
34.6%
of landed value from 28.5% of landings by weight

Tuna earns the sector’s foreign exchange. Ghana landed 121,297 tonnes of tuna in 2023, worth GH¢3.40 billion,3 made up of skipjack 81,937 tonnes, yellowfin 29,875 tonnes, bigeye 3,349 tonnes and 6,136 tonnes of other tuna and tuna-like species3. Tuna is 28.5 per cent of landings by weight but 34.6 per cent by value3. It carries the export account, taken up in Pillar 2.

Assessed by the international commission for Atlantic tunas, 2022 to 2025: yellowfin is neither overfished nor subject to overfishing, at a maximum sustainable yield of 121,661 tonnes6. Skipjack (assessed in 2022) and bigeye (assessed in 2025) are also neither overfished nor subject to overfishing.

The unpriced link: the healthy fishery runs on the sick one

The two fisheries are commercially separate but biologically linked: investing in the profitable one exposes you to the health of the other. The pole-and-line tuna fleet, three vessels in its fishery improvement project, catches its own live bait, and that bait is anchovy, juvenile round sardinella and round scad.12 Round sardinella, near a tenth of its historical maximum, is taken before it can spawn. The last published acoustic survey, by the research vessel Dr Fridtjof Nansen in July and August 2019, estimated 67,553 tonnes of pelagic fish, of which anchovies 18,372 tonnes and sardinellas only 7,398 tonnes.9

The bait fishery’s document calls the three species all abundant in Ghanaian coastal waters because of the local upwelling12, but the assessments do not support that. An earlier regional assessment on 2017 data placed anchovy above the biomass for maximum sustainable yield, resting on a single Togolese catch rate series;5 the 2022 regional assessment put the Ghana, Togo and Benin anchovy stock at 62 per cent of that biomass with fishing mortality at 148 per cent of the sustainable level, and advised closing the fishery.11 Both main bait species, anchovy and round sardinella, are now assessed as overexploited.5

Diagram: how the pole-and-line tuna fishery depends on a collapsing small pelagic bait stock
Figure 3 How the pole-and-line tuna fleet depends on a collapsing small pelagic stock
A pole-and-line crew member scooping small live anchovy and juvenile sardinella bait from a live-bait tank aboard a tuna vessel, documentary photograph
What this shows

The arrow that matters runs right to left along the bottom. Pole-and-line is normally the sustainability story a European buyer pays a premium for, and it is precisely that method which ties the fleet to a depleted stock and to its juveniles. The dependency is documented inside the fishery’s own management strategy and absent from the national plans governing the stock it draws on.

In January 2026 Ghana’s Atlantic skipjack and yellowfin tuna fisheries were certified to the Marine Stewardship Council standard, covering both the purse seine and the pole-and-line fleets, with certificates valid to January 2031. The pole-and-line units are the smaller part: MSC’s records show about 4,700 tonnes of pole-and-line catch in 2023 against about 74,000 tonnes from the purse seiners.13 Its announcement does not mention the bait supply.

The bait risk.The fishery’s own management strategy addresses its bait. The risk is unpriced: documented inside the fishery, but absent from the national plans that govern the stock it draws on and the certification a buyer sits behind. Pole-and-line earns its premium by being selective and low in bycatch, tying the fleet to the same depleted stock and its juveniles. Falling bait would raise the pole-and-line fleet’s costs and could force a change of method, putting its certificate at risk; the purse seine certificate covers separate units. Ask any tuna processing investment for its bait composition and cost trend, and read it against the 2022 regional assessment, which rates both anchovy and round sardinella as overexploited.

🐟 What is not measured, and why that is a commercial fact 🐟

Ghana publishes annual landings estimates, but no continuous price series and no complete census of producers since 2016. The last census found 11,583 canoes, 107,518 fishermen and 292 landing beaches in 186 villages, counted on the beach7, and the Commission has since published preliminary results from the 2022 Canoe Frame Survey, which put operational marine canoes at 12,175 against 11,583 in 20163. Registers report 13,700 canoes registered in 2023 and 10,661 embossed; a register counts registrations, which can differ from the boats in use.3

The newest stock assessment, the 2022 regional one, runs on data to 2021, and the last published acoustic survey was in 2019. Ghana no longer owns a fisheries research vessel, and every assessment survey in the last two decades was run from a foreign vessel. Ghana had no formally designated marine protected area in its exclusive economic zone as at March 2025, and declared its first, at Greater Cape Three Points, in April 2026, taken up in Pillar 3.914 Ghana holds 227,500 square kilometres of exclusive economic zone15, and nearly all fishing happens over the narrower continental shelf.

Action points. Date every fleet, catch and stock number in a model and show the vintage on the page, because most figures in this sector are a 2016 census or a 2019 survey wearing a current date. Price the cost of finding out independently before committing capital: a landing-site count, a season of catch records from the canoes you intend to buy from, and your own size sampling.

A fisheries officer with a clipboard counting canoes on a crowded Ghanaian landing beach at dawn, a decade-old survey ledger beside a laptop, documentary photograph
2016
the year of the last full canoe census
2021
the newest data year behind any stock assessment, the 2022 regional one

🐟 The risks that sit inside the resource itself 🐟

Fishermen sorting a small basket of small pelagic fish beside a beached canoe, a thin catch against the boats and empty nets behind

Building a business on a stock that is still falling

VERY HIGH
What it is

The small pelagic stocks supplying most of Ghana's domestic fish sit below the biomass for maximum sustainable yield and have been fished above the sustainable rate since 2004. Volume to any buyer is neither stable nor rising.

Evidence

Round sardinella landings fell from 119,515 tonnes in 1992 to 11,834 tonnes in 2019, and the fleet applies a fishing mortality of 0.81 against a sustainable 0.44. Catch a trip fell from 626 kg in 2022 to 454 kg in 2023, a fall the Fisheries Commission linked to warmer water, and the 2022 regional assessment rates the sardinella and anchovy stocks as overexploited.3

Who it hits

Processors, cold-store operators, feed buyers and lenders financing against projected annual throughput.

How to manage it, and the opening

Size the plant for the worst recent year, and contract across several landing sites and seasons, since the variability comes from the resource. Build the model on value added a tonne. The opening: a shrinking raw supply raises the value of post-harvest loss recovered (Pillars 5 and 6).

A crew member's cupped hands holding a fistful of small live anchovy and juvenile sardinella bait aboard a tuna vessel

The bait dependency inside the tuna fishery

HIGH
What it is

Ghana's pole-and-line tuna fleet catches its own live bait, and that bait includes juvenile round sardinella, a species whose 2019 landings were about a tenth of the 1992 peak. The healthiest fishery draws an essential input from the least healthy one, and takes it before it spawns.

Evidence

The bait is anchovy, juvenile round sardinella and round scad12. Round sardinella fell to 9.9 per cent of its historical maximum4. The same source calls all three bait species abundant, but the 2022 regional assessment rates both anchovy and round sardinella as overexploited.5

Who it hits

Tuna processors, cannery investors, and buyers relying on a pole-and-line sustainability claim for premium positioning.

How to manage it, and the opening

Require the bait composition and catch data before investing, read it against the 2022 regional assessment of anchovy and round sardinella, and carry bait supply as a named line in the risk register. The opening: hatchery or imported bait, or gear that reduces live-bait dependence, is an unserved need, with a small, captive customer base of three pole-and-line vessels.

A fisheries officer with a clipboard recording a catch as a trader weighs a basket of small pelagic fish on a hanging scale at a landing beach

Planning against old numbers

MEDIUM-HIGH
What it is

The fleet count rests on a 2016 census and a preliminary 2022 survey, the newest stock assessment runs on data to 2021, and published fish prices are scattered and mostly years old. Business cases are routinely built on figures four to ten years old and presented as current.

Evidence

The 2022 Canoe Frame Survey results remain preliminary3. Published canoe counts range from 11,583 to 14,031 depending on source and basis. Ghana has not owned a research vessel for about two decades9.

Who it hits

Investors, lenders and anyone preparing a feasibility study, particularly where a funder requires market sizing.

How to manage it, and the opening

Date every figure in the model, and treat any market size that omits its base year as unverified. Budget for collecting landing prices before committing capital. The opening is commercial: current, credible landing and price data is a product several buyers would pay for.

🐟 The Opening: what actually pays 🐟
01

Loss reduction and cold chain. The small pelagic openings sit after the landing, in losing less, grading, chilling and smoking cleanly. A shrinking raw supply raises the value of every point of loss recovered (Pillars 5 and 6).

02

Alternative or certified bait supply. Hatchery or imported bait, or gear that reduces live-bait dependence, is an unserved need, with a small, captive customer base of three pole-and-line vessels (Pillar 4).

03

Independent data and price services. Current, credible landing and price data is a product several buyers would pay for (Pillar 7).

🐟 Key takeaways 🐟
01

Ghana has two marine fisheries in opposite conditions. Establish which one a proposal sits in before assessing anything else.

02

The small pelagic stocks have been overfished and overfishing since 2004, round sardinella landings in 2019 at about a tenth of the 1992 peak, and the 2022 regional assessment rates sardinellas and anchovy as overexploited. The business case starts after the landing.

03

Tuna is 28.5 per cent of landings by weight and 34.6 per cent by value: it earns most per tonne while the canoe fleet earns most in total. All three tuna stocks are in good standing.

04

The pole-and-line tuna fleet's live bait includes juvenile round sardinella and anchovy, both rated overexploited in 2022. The healthiest fishery takes the sickest one's young, and no national plan accounts for it.

05

The fleet count rests on a 2016 census and a preliminary 2022 survey that disagree with the registers, the newest stock assessment uses data to 2021, and the first marine protected area was declared only in 2026. Date every figure before using it.

Written for each reader

🐟 Practitioner intelligence 🐟

Hover any card to pause and lift it.

For students

Leave buying a canoe, or a share in one, until later. That asset carries the most resource risk and the least control in the chain. Start by selling information or handling, neither of which needs much capital: spend a season recording daily landings, sizes and beach prices at one site and you will hold a record that processors, lenders and the ministry lack. Fish supply is allocated through credit relationships between traders and canoe owners that take a season to enter. What you leave with is the relationship and the data, the basis for later aggregation or processing business.

For entrepreneurs

Secure the offtake before the fish: sign a buyer for a graded, consistent product before committing to handling or processing capacity, since the scarce thing is a customer who pays for quality. Build backwards to supply, contracting across several landing sites, and size the facility for the worst recent year. The trap this sector punishes hardest is capacity built against an average landing figure from a 2016 or 2019 report.

For investors

The thesis is value per tonne: the resource has a ceiling and the volume line sits outside management's control. Require any tuna investment to produce its live-bait catch data and bait cost trend, and treat an inability to produce them as a finding, since the bait includes juvenile round sardinella, a species rated overexploited in the 2022 regional assessment. Require every volume assumption to state its base year, and discount any market sizing resting on the 2016 frame survey or the 2019 assessment. Release capital against verified throughput and a signed offtake.

For ecosystem actors

The binding constraint on the resource side is measurement. Publishing the full 2022 marine canoe frame survey, repeating it every three years and publishing a monthly landing-beach price series would cost a fraction of any enterprise-support programme and would give lenders verified volumes to plan against. This sector has repeatedly funded landing infrastructure ahead of the data to site it: of nine landing sites planned under the World Bank’s West Africa Regional Fisheries Program, one was built, at Anloga.16 Public money should buy the evidence base that lets private capital price the risk.

Where this connects. The demand this stock cannot meet, and the imports filling it, are in Pillar 2. The illegal fishing and enforcement deciding how much stock survives are in Pillar 3. The fleets, and the premix fuel keeping too many at sea, are in Pillar 4.

Footnotes
  1. Ministry of Fisheries and Aquaculture. Medium-Term Expenditure Framework (MTEF) for 2025-2028: Programme Based Budget Estimates for 2025. Accra: Ministry of Finance, 2025. https://mofep.gov.gh/sites/default/files/pbb-estimates/2025/2025-PBB-MFAD.pdf.↑
  2. Ministry of Fisheries and Aquaculture. Programme Based Budget Estimates for 2026 (Medium-Term Expenditure Framework 2026-2029). Ministry of Finance, Republic of Ghana, 2025. https://www.mofep.gov.gh/sites/default/files/pbb-estimates/2026/2026-PBB-MFAD.pdf.↑
  3. Fisheries Commission. 2023 Annual Performance Report. Accra: Fisheries Commission, Ministry of Fisheries and Aquaculture Development, 2024. https://www.mofaq.gov.gh/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/Very-final_2023-APR-FINAL-02082024_Board.pdf.↑
  4. Lazar, N., K. Yankson, J. Blay, P. Ofori-Danson, P. Markwei, K. Agbogah, P. Bannerman, M. Sotor, K. K. Yamoah, and W. B. Bilisini. Status of the Small Pelagic Stocks in Ghana in 2019. GH2014_SCI083_CRC. Narragansett, RI: Coastal Resources Center, Graduate School of Oceanography, University of Rhode Island, 2020. https://www.crc.uri.edu/download/GH2014_SCI083_CRC_FIN508.pdf.↑
  5. Cook, Robin M., Benjamin Kofi Nyarko, Joseph Aggrey-Fynn, Emmanuel Acheampong, and Godfred Ameyaw Asiedu. Assessment of Small Pelagic Fish Stocks in Ghanaian and Adjacent Waters. Gh.3.0b. Glasgow: One Ocean Hub, University of Strathclyde, 2021. https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3956447.↑
  6. International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas. Report for Biennial Period, 2024-25, Part II (2025), Vol. 2: SCRS. Madrid: International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas, 2026. https://www.iccat.int/Documents/BienRep/REP_EN_24-25-II-2.pdf.↑
  7. Dovlo, E., K. Amador, and B. Nkrumah. Report on the 2016 Ghana Marine Canoe Frame Survey. Information Report No. 36. Accra: Fisheries Scientific Survey Division, Fisheries Commission, Ministry of Fisheries and Aquaculture Development, 2016. https://www.crc.uri.edu/download/Final-2016-Canoe-Frame-Survey-Report.pdf.↑
  8. United Nations Statistics Division. UN Comtrade Database: Ghana (reporter 288) Fish Imports and Exports, HS 03 and HS 1604, 2023 to 2025. United Nations, 2026. https://comtradeplus.un.org/.↑
  9. Ministry of Fisheries and Aquaculture Development. National Fisheries and Aquaculture Policy. Accra: Ministry of Fisheries and Aquaculture Development, 2022. https://www.mofaq.gov.gh/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/National-Fisheries-and-Aquaculture-Policy-2022-FINAL-1.pdf.↑
  10. Wabnitz, Colette C. C., and Vanessa F. Jaiteh. Gender and Fisheries: Ghana. Country Fact Sheet. Ocean Risk and Resilience Action Alliance (ORRAA), 2025. https://oceanrisk.earth/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/Ghana-fact-sheet.pdf.↑
  11. Fishery Committee for the Eastern Central Atlantic (CECAF), Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. Outcomes of the 9th Scientific Sub-Committee. CECAF/XXIII/2023/4. Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, 2023. https://openknowledge.fao.org/server/api/core/bitstreams/3e5a5334-dab4-4b63-87a9-0e121b684a6c/content.↑
  12. Key Traceability Ltd. Ghana Tuna, Pole and Line FIP: ETP Management Strategy. Project ref. 0080. Portsmouth, UK: Key Traceability Ltd, for FisheryProgress, 2024. https://fisheryprogress.org/sites/default/files/documents_actions/0080%20Ghana%20tuna%20pole%20and%20line%20-%20ETP%20Management%20Strategy%20September%202024.pdf.↑
  13. Marine Stewardship Council. "Ghanaian Atlantic Ocean Skipjack and Yellowfin Tuna Fisheries Meet MSC Sustainability Benchmark." Press release, 22 January 2026. https://www.msc.org/media-centre/press-releases/press-release/ghanaian-atlantic-ocean-skipjack-and-yellowfin-tuna-fisheries-meet-msc-sustainability-benchmark.↑
  14. Kankam, Stephen, Justice Nana Inkoom, Steve Lindfield, Justice Camillus Mensah, and Kofi Agbogah. Analytical Review of Marine Protected Area (MPA) Implementation Policies, Legislation, and Strategies in Ghana. Peterborough, UK: Joint Nature Conservation Committee, 2025. https://data.jncc.gov.uk/data/44f40c78-de5a-4e59-9cbc-8f59ae8cda80/ocpp-ghana-review-of-mpa-implementation.pdf.↑
  15. Key Traceability Ltd. Ghana Pole and Line Tuna Fishery: Habitat Impacts of the Fishery. Assessment of Habitat Information and Management in the Ghana Pole and Line Fishery Improvement Project. Project ref. 0080. Portsmouth, UK: Key Traceability Ltd, for FisheryProgress, 2021. https://fisheryprogress.org/sites/default/files/indicators-documents/11a-c%20Evaluate%20available%20information%20on%20habitats%20and%20MPAs%20related%20to%20habitat%20protection%20in%20the%20fishing%20areas_1.pdf.↑
  16. World Bank. Implementation Completion and Results Report on an International Development Association Credit in the Amount of SDR 31.1 Million (US$50.3 Million Equivalent) and a Global Environment Facility Grant in the Amount of US$3.5 Million to the Republic of Ghana for a Ghana Project under the First Phase of the West Africa Regional Fisheries Program. ICR00004525. Washington, DC: World Bank, 2019. https://documents.worldbank.org/en/publication/documents-reports/documentdetail/866911554409721545.↑
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