Start with the price ladder nobody publishes. With a notebook, a hanging scale and a season of early mornings you can record what the canoe is paid, what the processor pays and what the market charges for the same fish on the same day at one site. No such record exists in Ghana after 2019. Do not begin by buying fish to resell: the landing is already committed to the trader who prefinanced the trip. What you leave a season with is that relationship, a dataset processors and lenders will take a meeting for, and a real sense of the margins before risking capital.
First move: sign the buyer before you touch the fish. The scarce thing is not supply, which arrives by the container from Mauritania and China, but a customer who pays a premium for consistency, and the Ghanaian proof of that is a canned tuna line worth US$140.7 million. Secure the offtake, specify the product to that buyer's standard, then build only the capacity the contract needs. Model your landed cost twice, with the 2023 frozen seafood levy of GH¢251 a tonne and without it, because nobody can tell you which case is live. Do not build import substitution on the 640,182 tonne figure as a national deficit: the fraction describing your market is the 28 per cent import share of real supply.
The investable thesis: value per tonne on the export leg and policy-adjusted landed cost on the import leg, because the volume side of both is unreliable and the resource has a ceiling. Require any cannery investment to produce its current capacity and utilisation, since the circulating figure is about 40,000 tonnes and no ceiling is published. Require sight of European sanitary approval and surveillance audit history, and treat the unlifted yellow card as a covenant item. Require every trade volume to name its source, because Ghana's own documents give the 2023 export volume as a permit count and a trade indicator that are not the same measure. Market-access concentration is the dominant risk, sized by asking what share of revenue would survive a red card.
The lever: a published price series and a single defined trade measure. A monthly landing-beach and wholesale price bulletin for five species at ten sites, and one gazetted definition of what the ministry's import and export volume indicators count, would cost less than one harbour rehabilitation and would move a measurable number: the share of fisheries business plans underwritten against verified revenue, currently close to none. Make publication a condition of the money rather than an afterthought, because no bank can finance a revenue line with no observable market price.
Start with the price ladder nobody publishes. With a notebook, a hanging scale and a season of early mornings you can record what the canoe is paid, what the processor pays and what the market charges for the same fish on the same day at one site. No such record exists in Ghana after 2019. Do not begin by buying fish to resell: the landing is already committed to the trader who prefinanced the trip. What you leave a season with is that relationship, a dataset processors and lenders will take a meeting for, and a real sense of the margins before risking capital.
First move: sign the buyer before you touch the fish. The scarce thing is not supply, which arrives by the container from Mauritania and China, but a customer who pays a premium for consistency, and the Ghanaian proof of that is a canned tuna line worth US$140.7 million. Secure the offtake, specify the product to that buyer's standard, then build only the capacity the contract needs. Model your landed cost twice, with the 2023 frozen seafood levy of GH¢251 a tonne and without it, because nobody can tell you which case is live. Do not build import substitution on the 640,182 tonne figure as a national deficit: the fraction describing your market is the 28 per cent import share of real supply.
The investable thesis: value per tonne on the export leg and policy-adjusted landed cost on the import leg, because the volume side of both is unreliable and the resource has a ceiling. Require any cannery investment to produce its current capacity and utilisation, since the circulating figure is about 40,000 tonnes and no ceiling is published. Require sight of European sanitary approval and surveillance audit history, and treat the unlifted yellow card as a covenant item. Require every trade volume to name its source, because Ghana's own documents give the 2023 export volume as a permit count and a trade indicator that are not the same measure. Market-access concentration is the dominant risk, sized by asking what share of revenue would survive a red card.
The lever: a published price series and a single defined trade measure. A monthly landing-beach and wholesale price bulletin for five species at ten sites, and one gazetted definition of what the ministry's import and export volume indicators count, would cost less than one harbour rehabilitation and would move a measurable number: the share of fisheries business plans underwritten against verified revenue, currently close to none. Make publication a condition of the money rather than an afterthought, because no bank can finance a revenue line with no observable market price.