What does Ghana produce and export?

Cocoa reached Ghana late and spread fast. Pods carried from the island of Fernando Pó in 1879 were planted in the Eastern Region, and within forty years smallholders had made the Gold Coast the largest producer in the world, without plantations and largely without European capital. The crop sits in the forest belt across Ashanti, Brong-Ahafo and the west, where rainfall and shade suit it. Ghana grew 10% of the world's cocoa beans in 2024 (FAOSTAT) and held 7.7% of world cocoa export value in 2024 (CEPII BACI). Output has been held back by the swollen shoot virus, which has no cure and requires infected trees to be cut out, and by aging farms replanted more slowly than they decline.

The marketing system explains the quality reputation. A state board buys the entire crop through licensed companies at a fixed farmgate price, controls fermentation and drying standards, and sells forward on the London market, which is why Ghanaian beans usually earn a premium and why chocolate makers can buy them by description rather than by inspection. The fixed price also means that when the world price moves far above it, beans are smuggled across the western border, and when it falls, farmers are protected.

Gold is older than the state and gave the colony its name. The Birimian greenstone belts of southwestern Ghana carry both deep quartz reefs, mined at Obuasi since the 1890s, and shallow oxide ore worked in open pits at Tarkwa and Ahafo. A large artisanal and small-scale sector, much of it unlicensed and mercury-using, operates alongside the industrial mines and complicates both production accounting and river pollution. Ghana produced 4.5% of world gold in 2025 (USGS). Rubber planted in the far southwest, on the same rain belt that carries cocoa, supplied 1.4% of world natural rubber export value in 2024 (CEPII BACI). Offshore oil, first produced from the Jubilee field in 2010, added a third export that the older economy did not have.