Ghana has already lived through what the rest of the world is being warned about.

The lineage

In 1843 a Scottish hat-maker named James Wilson founded a newspaper to fight a grain-price injustice: the Corn Laws, which kept bread dear for the many to protect the margins of the few. He promised readers that sound principles would be, in his words, “most rigidly applied to all the important questions of the day.” That paper became The Economist.

In 1909 an American reporter named Warren C. Platt started a petroleum trade journal on a simpler conviction: that the men who bought and sold oil deserved to know its real price, and that the companies who preferred the price obscure should not be the ones deciding it. His price sheets became the benchmarks the world's oil still trades against.

Both began as publications and became infrastructure. Neither started with the number it ended up owning. That sequence — argument first, benchmark second — is the one we are following, and the reason this editorial leads with a case rather than a price.

The argument

For four years economists have warned of a particular kind of crisis: debt at record levels meeting an inflationary supply shock, leaving central banks trapped between raising rates into a debt crisis and letting inflation run. The warning is that they choose the second — that they accept higher inflation for years and let the real value of nominal claims be ground away. Savings, bonds, pensions and fixed contracts are diminished. Real productive assets are not.

Ghana has already been through it. Inflation passed fifty per cent at the end of 2022. The cedi lost roughly half its value against the dollar across that year. The country defaulted on its external debt, and the Domestic Debt Exchange Programme took a haircut out of domestic bondholders — pension funds, banks and ordinary savers whose only error was holding a nominal claim.

The question that follows is the one nobody has answered with evidence: when the paper claims were destroyed, what happened to the real ones?

The record

It can be answered here because the record exists. The wholesale price record of Ghana's grain, oilseed, root and input markets, from January 2023 through April 2024 — the window of the default, the debt exchange and the disinflation that followed. Maize, soya, sorghum, cowpea, groundnut, millet and rice, traded in the standard bags of Techiman, Kumasi and Bolgatanga.

The archive is kept to the Birkdal Methodology, and the findings drawn from it are published in the Library.

The second gap

Every week thousands of tonnes of grain change hands in Techiman, Kumasi, Bolgatanga and a dozen markets between. There is no number the farmer in Wenchi, the aggregator in Kintampo, the feed miller in Kumasi, the banker in Accra and the investor in London can all look at and agree is the price. The wholesaler knows what she paid this morning. The farmer three hours north does not. The investor deciding whether Ghanaian agriculture deserves capital knows least, and prices risk accordingly. The cost of that is borne right along the chain, and most heavily at the end of it with the least capacity to carry it.

There is a second layer, less discussed and more expensive. Every trader in Techiman quotes in cedis; every investor weighing Ghanaian agriculture thinks in dollars. Between those two facts sits the most under-reported number in Ghanaian agribusiness — the real, currency-adjusted price of grain. A move in the cedi changes the domestic price of grain and the dollar price of grain in opposite directions, and a series reported in one denomination will not show it.

What Songhai Wire publishes

1. Analysis built on the record. The 2023–24 archive, cleaned, documented, and always presented as what it is. We do not dress two-year-old data as this morning's price.
2. Every price in three denominations — cedis per kilogram, dollars per tonne, and deflated to real terms. The three tell three different stories and usually only one is told.
3. Currency and import parity. The arithmetic of whether imported grain lands cheaper than local grain, decomposed into world price, freight, insurance, duty, exchange rate and inland transport. This decides whether import substitution is a slogan or a business.
4. A house view, labelled as such — with its horizon, the mechanism it depends on, and a plain statement of what would prove it wrong.
5. A scorecard. We revisit our own calls in public and mark them. Where we are wrong we record it at the length at which we made the original claim.
6. A published methodology and a disclosed interest. Both below, and both in full on their own pages.

The benchmark

The objective is the price benchmark for Ghanaian agriculture: weekly assessed prices at named markets, each with a permanent symbol, its observation count and its range, so that a number can be checked, contracted against and, in time, traded on. Regional coverage, forward indications and programmatic access follow.

Assessed prices require collection from named markets on defined days. Assessment series are in build under the Methodology, and each is published with the observation count behind every number.

Independence, disclosed

Songhai Wire is published by Birkdal Partners Ltd, which originates farmland and forward supply contracts in Ghana and West Africa. Birkdal assembles and de-risks farmland and leases developed blocks to commercial farming operators. It therefore holds a direct commercial interest in West African agriculture succeeding.

That is stated here, at the front, in the first thing published under this masthead, because a reader cannot weigh the numbers without it. Some price reporting agencies are owned by houses with no stake in what they report. That is not our position and we will not imply that it is.

What is offered instead of a claim to disinterest is a set of controls a reader can check: assessments produced mechanically under a published methodology; every number reconstructible from its inputs; observation counts printed whether or not they flatter us; exclusions recorded with reasons; commentary separated from data and never an input to it. Birkdal's own forward contracts are reference-priced against the Ghana Commodity Exchange, never against a Songhai Wire assessment.

And an undertaking, published in the methodology so it can be held against us: before any third party marks collateral or settles a contract against a Songhai Wire number, we will put independent assurance over the process that produces it.

Scale

Benchmarks start narrow: one argument, properly evidenced; one basis market; eight assessed prices.

Wilson's contest between intelligence and ignorance has not finished; it has moved. It is consequential in the markets that feed West Africa, and it is decided by numbers rather than by assertion. That is the work.

— The Editor
Accra & Techiman