Ghana ranks in the top ten producers of 8 commodities: yams (#2, 11% of world output in 2024), cocoa (#3, 10% of world output in 2024), manganese (#3, 10% of world output in 2025), cassava (#4, 8.2% of world output in 2024), plantains (#4, 10% of world output in 2024), cashews (#5, 5.2% of world output in 2024) and more. It is a top-ten exporter of yams (#1, 25% of world export value in 2024), manganese (#3, 8.7% of world export value in 2024), cocoa (#4, 7.7% of world export value in 2024), bauxite (#6, 1% of world export value in 2024), cashews (#7, 5.3% of world export value in 2024) and more.
Share of world production, 2024. Countries with no reported production are unshaded.
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.
Ghana's largest commodity exports by value. Each bar's share is that commodity's share of world trade in it, not its share of Ghana's own exports — the two are unrelated and shown so a bar near 100% marks a commodity Ghana dominates globally rather than one it merely exports a lot of.
Unlike the chart above, this treemap sizes each commodity by its share of Ghana's own $8.8 billion of tracked exports, not by world trade. Gold alone is 67% of it. See the full export dependency report for how Ghana compares with other countries.
Jute: #9, 1.3% of world imports, $2.7 million (2024)
Sources: FAOSTAT (crops and livestock), USGS Mineral Commodity Summaries (minerals), Energy Institute Statistical Review (energy) for production; CEPII BACI for trade. Ranks count only the commodities on this site.
Ghana commodity by commodity
One page for each commodity where Ghana is a top-five producer or exporter with at least 3% of the world total.
What the cross-commodity reports under Patterns say about Ghana, computed from the same data as this page.
What Ghana uses
Ghana had about 34 million people and a food supply of 3,125 kilocalories per person a day in FAO's 2023 food balance sheets. Its eight largest supplies among the commodities tracked there:
Largest domestic supplies of tracked commodities in Ghana, 2023
FAO reports a negative domestic supply for Ghana's coffee (−1 thousand tonnes; production 1 thousand tonnes, imports 1 thousand tonnes, exports 3 thousand tonnes), meaning exports exceed production plus imports in the year. These are not counted as use and are left out of the table above.
FAOSTAT Food Balance Sheets. Per-person rank counts countries of at least 1 million people. See consumption and self-sufficiency.
How long Ghana's own reserves would last
Manganese: Ghana's reserves are about 7 years of its own output at the current rate (10% of world output, 0.7% of world reserves), against 90 years for the world.
Gold: Ghana's reserves are about 7 years of its own output at the current rate (4.5% of world output, 1.5% of world reserves), against 20 years for the world.
USGS national reserve figures, rounded. A short national figure usually reflects how little has been proved up, not when mining stops. See country reserve life.
Downloads and citation
This country's rankings as JSON · PDF summary. Cite as: Commodity Origins, "What does Ghana produce and export?", https://commodityorigins.com/countries/GHA/ (CC BY 4.0).
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