Ghana is wasting food while its people go hungry – This must stop

By dawn at Makola Market in Accra and the Agbogbloshie food hub, trucks arrive heavy with tomatoes from Tuobodom and plantains from the Ashanti region. By evening, a heartbreaking transformation occurs thus, crates of produce that softened in the tropical heat are tipped into black polythene bags and hauled to landfills. Meanwhile, just a few kilometers away, households are skipping meals or cutting portions because food prices have become a barrier to survival.

This contradiction is not just an unfortunate reality, it is a systemic failure. Ghana must treat food loss as a critical economic leak and transition from our current linear waste model to a Circular Food System, one that protects food before it spoils and transforms unavoidable waste into high-value assets like organic fertilizer and animal feed.

The High Cost of Normal Waste

Current estimates suggest that between 20% and 50% of food produced in Ghana never reaches a plate. In the middle-belt grain bins and coastal vegetable corridors, the lack of integrated cold chain systems means spoilage is built into the price of food. When a third of our fruits and vegetables rot, the Embedded Energy; the water, labor, and fertilizer used to grow them is also wasted. This inefficiency drives up market prices, making nutritious diets a luxury for the average Ghanaian family.

From Linear to Circular: The Solution

Our current system is linear where we produce, transport, sell, and discard. A circular system eliminates the concept of waste by focusing on three pillars:

1. Prevention and Stabilization: We must incentivize decentralized processing. Instead of tomatoes rotting in wooden crates, small-scale upcycling hubs can convert surplus into pastes or dried powders, extending shelf life from days to months.

2. Market Coordination: Improving the Physical Asset of our markets through better ventilation and solar-powered cold storage is cheaper than the cost of importing food to replace what we throw away.

3. Nutrient Recovery: What truly cannot be eaten should never reach a landfill. Organic market waste can be converted into high-quality compost or insect-based animal feed, returning vital nutrients to our depleted soils and reducing our reliance on expensive imported fertilizers.

A Call for Institutional Leadership

Individual behavior alone cannot fix a broken system. Real change requires a Policy Shield:

• The Ministry of Food and Agriculture (MoFA) must move beyond production-only targets and prioritize post-harvest infrastructure and aggregation.
• District Assemblies must organize market waste separation to fuel local composting partnerships.
• The Private Sector should be incentivized to innovate in “last-mile” logistics and affordable cold chains.

Conclusion: The Choice is Ours

If Ghana continues to tolerate this level of waste, we are effectively buying hunger. A circular food system is not an academic ideal but a common sense with structure. We must protect our nutrition, organize our markets, and return life to our soil. The question is no longer whether we can afford to change, but how much longer we can afford to wait while our national assets rot in plain sight.

By Henrietta Appiah