Comparative Performance of Agricultural Export Trade: During and Post-Agricultural Diversification Project in Ghana

Abstract

This study compares export performance for seven agricultural commodities prior to, during and after initiation of the Agricultural Diversification project (1991-1999) in Ghana. This is to help identify the impact of the initiative on Ghana’s agricultural exports and to ascertain the ability or otherwise of the country to sustain or improve on performances observed under the project. Covering the years 1987 to 2011, the study primarily made use of secondary data on commodity and aggregate agricultural export valuesfor Ghana and the world, the latter being used as the reference group. In assessing export performance, the CEP,  SCEP and ln(CEP) indices were used and based on newly developed thresholds, commodities were placed under the categories “Highly Competitive”, “Competitive”, “Weakly Competitive” and “Uncompetitive”. Use of the thresholds helped in appropriately reflecting the fragileness of agricultural export trade.The results show that besides cocoa and pineapples which were “Highly Competitive” in export performance before initiation of the project, only rubber exports witnessed major improvement among the five other commodities during the project phase. Export performance for rubber has however dropped beyond its previous level in recent years, with that for oil palm rather improving upon its previous level. Improvements in oil palm export performance have been attributed torecent efforts put in place by various stakeholders in the subsector to promote export development of the commodity, while decline in performance of rubber exports is attributed to a decrease in attention paid to the subsector among other potential inefficiencies.Although the export dimension of agriculture is believed to have witnessed major growth in recent years due to beneficial implications of the diversification project, the current study concludes based on findings that, the growth observed is possibly due to major improvements in fewer subsectors. Effort should therefore be put towards revisiting some of the growth enhancing measures implemented under the initiative, promoting stakeholder participation in export promotion and current production and marketing inefficiencies addressed to enhance export growth.