Claim: Since 2017, we haven’t imported a grain of maize into this country – Deputy Agriculture Minister Yaw Frimpong.
Verdict: False! According to credible data sources, including the World Integrated Trade Solution (WITS), Ghana imported maize in 2019.
Full Text
The Deputy Agriculture Minister for Ghana, Yaw Frimpong Addo, has said that Ghana has not imported maize in the last five years, that is, since 2017.
The claim was made on Asaase Radio’s Talk show programme, ‘the Asaase Breakfast Show’ and published on the radio station’s website.
The deputy agriculture minister was quoted to have said, “Our duty as a ministry was to increase production, [in] which, to a large extent, we have succeeded. Since 2017, we haven’t imported a grain of maize into this country.”
Mr Frimpong Addo added, “There are several stages in agriculture that an investor can add value. For us, it’s the private sector that has to be encouraged to support us. There’s close collaboration between the ministry and the researchers. There are a lot of varieties that we’re giving farmers to increase yields.”
It has become necessary to fact-check this claim because of the recent conversations about a possible food shortage in the country and the ongoing controversy about the effectiveness or otherwise of the government’s Planting for Food and Jobs (PFJ) program.
Before beginning the verification process, we sought to confirm if, indeed, the Deputy Minister for Agriculture, Frimpong Addo, made the statements reported in the news report on Asaase radio’s website.
When DUBAWA contacted him, he confirmed making those claims except to attempt a clarification.
So were there maize imports into the country, and from which year?
Verification
Our initial searches revealed a publication that provides contradictory evidence to the claim by the Deputy Minister. In a press conference in Accra on Sunday, August 29, 2021, the Minister of Food and Agriculture, Dr Owusu Afriyie Akoto, said the introduction of the Planting for Food and Jobs initiative has significantly reduced the importation of maize into the country.
“In 2015, Ghana imported over 100,000, that’s 113,000, 114,000 metric tonnes of maize and then nearly 80,000 metric tonnes of maize in 2016. When we came on, imports of maize virtually vanished. It went down from 80,000 to 40,000 in 2017 to 80,000 in 2018, and then these 2019 and 2020 as special maize needed for poultry production, which is the type, we cannot produce in Ghana otherwise; you would have zero in these two places,” Dr Afriyie Akoto is reported to have said.
Whilst the Minister confirmed a reduction in maize imports, his deputy insisted there was no importation.
Mr Yaw Frimpong Addo later told DUBAWA that the government had imposed a ban on the importation of maize into the country; it could not have been true that the government imported maize into the country in the period under review.
To buttress his point further, Mr Addo stated that if there was an importation of maize into the country from 2017, “then it was illegal. We made conscious efforts to up our game in maize production. Anybody importing maize that has no permit from the minister is illegal.”
When asked whether there is data from the Ministry of Agric on the importation of maize, he said, “there is no data. We don’t have any data at our place indicating that this quantity of maize was brought into the country in 2018 and 2019 because there is a ban on it. There is a ban on importation. We have our statistics department, and I will contact them. We are defending our budget to parliament. I will contact them, and when I get the information, we can talk about it. But I don’t think it will differ from what I said.”
When probed further, he made some concessions contrary to his initial claim. He stated, “2017, I will not dispute it because that was when we introduced the PFJ. But 2018, 2019, we had more than enough [Maize].”
This assertion was, however, not stated during his session at Asaase Radio, for he categorically stated during the radio show that “Since 2017, we haven’t imported a grain of maize into this country.”
DUBAWA further probed the matter even more, investigating if there were maize imports into the country from 2018 to 2022.
An email was sent to the Ministry of Food and Agriculture (MoFA) to acquire data on Ghana’s importation of maize from 2017 to 2022. The email also sought to determine the type of maize imported within that period.
However, DUBAWA is yet to receive a response from the ministry. This report will therefore be updated when the ministry provides any new information.
DUBAWA explored other sources of information to find data on maize importation in Ghana. On page 7 of the USDA Foreign Agricultural Services 2018 report on Ghana’s Grains and Feed, it is reported that,
“In the last three years, Ghana has imported small amounts of both white and yellow corn from Argentina and South Africa due to scarcity and its attendant high cost that occurred in those years. Corn imports in 2014/15 through 2016/17 were 2,356 MT, 98,880 MT, and 52,000 MT, respectively. Post estimates imports of 100,000 MT in 2017/18 to account for increasing seed purchases and growing demand from the domestic poultry industry.”
This report provides evidence that disputes the claim made by the Deputy Minister.
Additionally, data available from the World Integrated Trade Solution (WITS) indicate that in 2019, among other countries, Ghana imported maize from Nigeria, South Africa, the United States, Canada, and Croatia.
“From Nigeria, Ghana imported 1,400,010 kg of maize at a trade value of $2,317.22K. From South Africa, Ghana imported 938,872 Kg at a trade value of $2,297.40K. the country also imported 198,346 Kg of maize from the United States at a trade value of $1,607.94K.” This data is sourced from WITS.
We also searched the United Nations COMTRADE database for information on maize importation to Ghana. Data yielded from the website indicates that 6,728,380 kg worth of maize was imported into the country in 2020 from Niger, as shown in the image below.
Image: Screenshot of data from the UN Comtrade website.
Conclusion
Available data and information reveal that, after the introduction of the Planting for Food and Jobs initiative in 2017, the Government has still imported several tonnes of maize into the country. Therefore, the claim that Ghana has not imported maize since 2017 by the Deputy Agriculture Minister, Yaw Frimpong Addo, is false.
This report was produced under the DUBAWA Non-urban Journalists Mentorship project aimed at promoting a culture of truth and verification in non-urban newsrooms in Ghana with support from the US Embassy in Ghana.
