Blue Skies, the biggest fresh fruit processor in the country to import pineapples and mangoes, currently imports around 30% of Smooth Cayenne (a Ghanian pineapple) from Togo and South Africa. The company also imports mangoes from Brazil, The Gambia and South Africa.
Pineapple-exporting companies have dropped from 36 eight years ago, to only 5 recently. Blue Skies imports around 25,000 pieces of Smooth Cayenne variety out of the 80,000 pieces processed in a week from Togo and the Ivory Coast. One hundred tonnes of mangoes are also imported from Brazil every week for 11 continuous weeks.
The MD2 pineapple variety was pushed by the government despite it costing 3 times more to produce compared to the Smooth Cayenne. This resulted in the collapse of smallholder farmers as they were no longer able to afford the cost of production and the inputs were not always readily available.
Despite the MD2 craze, Blue Skies orders for Smooth Cayenne did not drop, so the company decided to motivate its farmers to continue growing Smooth Cayenne.
Exports of fresh pineapples reached its highest in 2004 with 71,000 tonnes a year which made Ghana the second largest exporter, after Cote d'Ivoire. Statistics indicate that the market for pineapple is worth about 1 billion euros, while that of bananas is 3.5 billion euros in the European Union alone.
