Horticultural Exports and Measures of Export Success: Lessons and Policy Implications from Ghana

Abstract

The fruit and vegetable sub –sector of horticultural products has attained important status in the Ghanaian economy since the liberalisation and export diversification pursued after the introduction of the Economic Recovery Programme (ERP) and the Structural adjustment (SAP) which followed in the 1980’s.Ghana’s trade policies since then have been tailored to pursue the promotion of horticultural export. Meanwhile, the issue of export success and how they are determined have become critical. Export success in this essence is not only critical to job creation but also to poverty alleviation in developing countries. This study thus sought to describe the horticultural export business in Ghana and to determine an appropriate measure for export success. Using a simple systematic sampling procedure, we identified most of the firms interviewed to be small scale horticultural exporting firms. The study found that, horticultural export business witnessed greatest number of firms participating in the late 90’s . Sole-proprietorship and joint-venture were found to be the dominating business holdings among the firms. For horticultural commodity to reach a consumer in at least three destination countries, four main transit/supply points were identified. We adopted the composite scale as the best form of assessing export success and our analysis revealed that, the gap between firms that were successful and those that were not, was quite close. The need for exporters to adopt and incorporate each component measures in their annual review of performance/success was recommended. Stakeholders in general were commended to adequately target their interventions at each section of the commodity supply chain in order to widen the population gap between the successful and unsuccessful exporting firms.