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In the rice-growing communities of Dadieso and Juaboso in the Western North Region, thousands of bags of rice and maize are rotting away because the government has failed to operationalise warehouses it constructed with taxpayers’ money.
Two government-built warehouses, each with a storage capacity of up to 1,000 metric tonnes of grains and cereals, have become white elephants sitting idle in the very communities they were built to serve.
A joint investigation by DUBAWA and Connect FM found that both facilities have either fallen into disrepair or been stripped of critical equipment and, in some cases, quietly repurposed for other uses, despite the government’s push to continue with its Feed Ghana Programme to boost domestic food production.
Warehouses rotting away
At Dadieso, the team found that the warehouse meant to protect farmers’ harvests has quietly taken on another life.
Sections of the roof have been ripped off, allowing rainwater into the very chamber designed to keep grains dry.
Its solar power system no longer functions. Its rice dryer sits rusting, disconnected from the power system it once relied on. An unused polytank sits abandoned on the premises, while makeshift stalls set up by traders have occupied much of the compound. The Assembly says it temporarily relocated the traders to the warehouse premises to make way for the construction of a 24-hour market at the original market site in Dadieso Township.
Abandoned cereals and grains dryer at Dadieso.
Source: DUBAWA
Idle warehouse surrounded by makeshift shops at Dadieso
Source; DUBAWA
39 kilometres away, another warehouse at Juaboso tells a similar story of neglect. Overgrown weeds have swallowed the facility.
Its lighting system lies dark after thieves stripped the compound of electrical cables and solar batteries. A rice dryer sits nearby, rusting and unused.
Warehouse overgrown with weeds at Juaboso, Source; DUBAWA
Electrical cables stolen, Source; DUBAWA
A major power system component was stolen, Source; DUBAWA
Drone footage of abandoned Juaboso warehouse, Source; DUBAWA
Two warehouses. Two farming districts. One failed promise.
That reality sits uneasily beside the government’s Feed Ghana Programme, which seeks to increase domestic production of rice, maize and other food crops as Ghana works toward greater food self-sufficiency and reduced dependence on imports.
The contradiction is difficult to ignore.
A warehouse built for a problem that remains
A warehouse is supposed to be more than concrete, steel and roofing. It should give farmers time to hold produce after harvest instead of selling when prices are lowest.
It should protect grain and cereals from rain, pests, and deterioration; preserve their market value; and bridge the gap between production and a reliable market. In Juaboso and Suaman Dadieso, that bridge has largely failed.
Both warehouses were constructed under Ghana’s One District, One Warehouse programme, introduced alongside the Planting for Food and Jobs campaign.
The policy rested on a straightforward idea. It was based on the philosophy that farmers should not be forced to sell their produce immediately after harvest simply because they lack storage.
With functional warehouses, farmers could preserve their harvest, wait for better prices, reduce post-harvest losses, and help stabilize food supplies between harvest seasons.
But in the two districts, that promise has not translated into dependable storage.
District agriculture authorities in both areas confirmed this investigation’s central finding. Neither facility is operating as the storage centre it was built to be.
In Dadieso, District Agriculture Director Daniel Koomson put it plainly, “We are not using it because ever since that facility was completed, it was never put into operation, as far as I know.”
Outside its walls, farmers are drying rice under difficult conditions, storing grain in kitchens and makeshift spaces, selling produce at reduced prices, and losing part of their harvest to moisture, rodents and poor storage.
The loss begins after the farmer has already done the hard part
For farmers, the distinction between administrative failure and physical decay matters less than the result. The storage they were promised is still not available.
Post-harvest loss is often discussed in percentages, tonnes and economic estimates, but in Dadieso, its real cost can be counted in sacks of rice and maize.
Hamawulai Seidu, the 2025 Dadieso District Best Farmer, Source; DUBAWA
Hamawulai Seidu, the 2025 Dadieso District Best Farmer, has farmed since 2008 and was named District Best Youth in Agriculture in 2012. He cultivates ginger, maize, rice, rubber, cocoa, and plantain across several hectares, with rice among his major investments; he produces two rice cycles a year, yielding between 800 and 900 bags each quarter.
But the size of his harvest does not guarantee the size of his income. Before a bag of rice can generate revenue, Seidu has already spent money on land preparation, transplanting, labour, food for workers and transportation, leaving him particularly exposed to losses during drying and storage.
“If it rains that year, over 100 bags of rice get spoiled,” he said, explaining that when rainfall prevents harvested rice from drying properly, the grain turns black and begins to germinate, making it unsuitable for sale at its expected value.
“The money invested goes down,” Seidu lamented.
At his milling centre, the cost of that neglect shows in hundreds of sacks of locally produced rice lying idle, some of which had sat so long that rodents had torn into them, destroying harvests farmers had spent months cultivating.
Some packed rice at Hamawulai Seidu milling centre at Dadieso. Source; DUBAWA
In Samanga, the consequences are visible inside Nafisa Ali’s kitchen, where sacks of rice have sat for more than a year because the warehouse that should have served farmers remains unavailable.
“The packed rice in my kitchen has been packed here for a year now. Most of the rice packed on the floor has spoiled, and mice are destroying the rice,” Ali said.
Her kitchen was never designed to function as a grain store, but the absence of a reliable public warehouse has effectively transferred that responsibility to the farmer’s household.
Over a year, rice was packed in a mud-built kitchen,Source; DUBAWA
Her husband, Ali Yakubu, said the situation was particularly frustrating because farmers had been led to believe the warehouse would solve exactly this problem.
“We were told we would keep the rice or maize we harvested in the warehouse, but it didn’t happen. So the warehouse built has been left abandoned, and it has brought hardship,” he said.
Ali Yakubu and Nafisa Ali, Rice farmers at Samanga, Source; DUBAWA
In Dadieso, Mariama Bukari said 20 full sacks of rice were destroyed after recent rains breached the makeshift facility where she was storing her produce.
Maize stored on the floor also began to rot, leaving only the upper portion of the pile salvageable. “This is not one person’s loss,” Bukari said. “It’s all the farmers. We are cultivating rice and maize, and losing it.”
The losses have become serious enough that she has stopped cultivating rice this year. This clearly illustrates how post-harvest losses can eventually become production losses, as farmers who repeatedly lose a significant share of their returns grow less willing to plant the same crop again.
For other farmers, the problem is not that the whole harvest disappears, but that its market value collapses.
Kwesi Yobe, a sharecropper who farms land he does not own and gives one-third of his harvest to the landowner, watches poor drying and storage shrink what little remains of his share.
Ama Afrah described the physical toll of manual work that a functioning dryer should ease. “I have to dry the sacks of rice each day with my strength as a woman, bringing it in and out of the milling centre to dry.”
Her frustration has pushed her to abandon rice farming altogether. “I am very angry. I have decided not to cultivate rice again,” she said.
Ama Afrah, a rice farmer at Afere, Source; DUBAWA
In Afere, within the Juaboso enclave, the consequences reach even students who farm rice between semesters to finance their education.
Moses Appiah and Victoria Asante, students at Wenchi Agricultural College, face the same losses as full-time farmers. Victoria described what happens when damaged rice reaches the market.
“Sometimes even ten blue paint containers (gragraa) which should sell for 700 cedis, are sold at 300 cedis because the rice is broken. I lost my investment totally due to the unavailability of a warehouse.”
Moses Appiah and Victoria Asante, student farmers at Afere, Source; DUBAWA
A Roman Catholic catechist, Kwesi Yobe and rice farmer in Afere linked the warehouse directly to the community it was meant to serve. “Rice farming is the only job we do in Afere,” he said. “Because of us farmers, that’s why the warehouse was built. So the government should support us farmers in that manner.”
A market working against the farmers
Farmers say the market is stacked against them even before spoilage becomes a factor. Imported rice prices, they say, have fallen from roughly GH¢1,200 per bag to between GH¢500 and GH¢580, while local rice has fallen from about GH¢800–900 to around GH¢400. Even at these lower prices, buyers remain scarce.
Quality compounds the problem. Caterers increasingly prefer imported rice because it arrives clean and de-stoned, while locally produced rice, without access to industrial processing, can still contain stones and chaff, making it less attractive to institutional buyers, including school feeding programmes.
Farmers also link the shrinking pool of local rice buyers and processors to illegal small-scale mining, or galamsey. They say women who once formed the backbone of the local rice-buying and processing trade are increasingly leaving agricultural communities for mining sites, further reducing the labour available to move rice from farms to markets.
The scale of the problem
The Juaboso District Agriculture Director, Samuel Kwabena Sarfo, estimates that between 40 and 50 per cent of the district’s farm produce is lost to post-harvest losses.
According to him, late harvesting and, most significantly, the lack of proper storage drive this. Juaboso alone has more than 45,000 registered farmers.
In Suaman Dadieso, Daniel Koomson also estimates post-harvest losses at 20 to 30 per cent.
Even without assigning a monetary value to every kilogramme lost, the scale is difficult to overstate. Large quantities of food are being lost after farmers have already invested land, labour and money into producing it, losses that directly undermine the ambitions of the Feed Ghana Programme.
The Juaboso agriculture director connected the pieces directly, warning that without functioning storage, “the quantity of produce needed to feed the market will reduce. And when that shortage also comes, food prices will be high. It affects everybody.”
The contradiction, in other words, is larger than two warehouses. A national programme is encouraging farmers to produce more food at precisely the point where the infrastructure needed to preserve, process and market that food remains inadequate.
An Accountability gap
The warehouses have exposed more than physical neglect. They’ve exposed a deeper accountability problem.
Government officials in both districts revealed uncertainty over who formally received the projects, who completed them, who is responsible for maintaining them, and who should finance their rehabilitation.
The District Chief Executive for Suaman Dadieso, Vasco Obour.
In Suaman Dadieso, District Chief Executive Vasco Obour said the Assembly lacks the documentation needed to establish the facility’s status.
“The truth of the matter is that as we speak, we have no documents covering it,” he said, adding that it remains unclear even whether the facility was formally completed. “Whether or not it was actually completed, we don’t know.”
For the Assembly, that missing paperwork carries real risk. He said officials are reluctant to fully use or rehabilitate the facility without clarity over outstanding contractual and financial obligations. “If we start using it, then a contractor comes saying: ‘give me my money’; it will bring about many issues,” he said.
Obour said some remedial work, including plumbing repairs, had already begun, with broader rehabilitation dependent on documentation and funding approval from the central government.
But an inspection of the premises during this investigation found no visible plumbing work underway. Instead, parts of the compound had been turned into makeshift trading spaces, while the warehouse itself remained largely unused.
The Assembly also says it is engaging the National Buffer Stock Company to create a market for locally produced rice and maize, with a view to supplying institutional buyers such as school feeding programmes.
But when this investigation asked for written evidence of that engagement, the Assembly said its communication with Buffer Stock had been verbal.
Officials also said they had sent letters to the Western North Regional Coordinating Council and the Ministry of Food and Agriculture about the warehouse’s documentation and status, but when asked to provide copies, the Assembly could not.
That distinction matters. The Assembly points to ongoing efforts to revive the facility and connect farmers to a market, but at the time of this investigation, there was no visible plumbing work at the warehouse, and no written correspondence to substantiate the claimed engagement with Buffer Stock.
What could be independently observed was a facility still largely unused, with sections of its premises serving as makeshift trading spaces rather than the functioning agricultural service centre officials say they intend to create.
District Chief Executive for Juaboso, Alexander Adu Quist.
District Chief Executive for Juaboso, Alexander Adu Quist, described the warehouse as a project built during what he called the “NPP era” under a special initiative. But he confirmed the facility was never formally handed over to the District Assembly, leaving a public asset sitting in an administrative grey area.
The consequences of that uncertainty are not merely administrative. He confirmed the break-in at the warehouse was reported to police, adding that the Assembly is still pursuing documentation to establish its legal custody of the facility.
Without that clarity, he explained, any attempt at rehabilitation could expose the Assembly to disputes with contractors or other parties connected to the original project.
Following the Money
Page 43 of the 2021 Reconciliation Report on the Petroleum Holding Fund states that GH¢9.4 million of the utilised Annual Budget Funding Amount (ABFA) was spent on agriculture in 2021, with GH¢7.95 million allocated through the Ministry of Agriculture for the construction of warehouses, small dams and irrigation projects under the Planting for Food and Jobs flagship programme.
Documented evidence shows that the warehouse project formed part of a nationally funded agricultural initiative. However, the report does not break down how much of that amount was spent specifically on the Dadieso and Juaboso facilities.
Expert solution
Agriculture and social entrepreneurship expert Issah Ouedraogo.
Agriculture expert Issah Ouedraogo noted that fixing the problem requires more than rehabilitating individual facilities.
He advocated for a non-partisan, long-term national strategy for agricultural infrastructure, one that extends beyond electoral cycles and is backed by an independent, adequately resourced monitoring body insulated from political change.
In his view, such a framework would ensure that facilities built under one administration remain functional regardless of which government takes office next.
Taken together, the accounts from Samanga, Dadieso and Afere point to a consistent pattern. Farmers are producing food, but the systems meant to protect that food after harvest are failing them.
The result is spoiled rice, rotting maize, depressed market prices, wasted labour, lost income, and, increasingly, farmers choosing not to cultivate rice again.
