The data basket
Chapter 4 · Four markets
March 2024
North–south price gap
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Lead report · RN 001
White maize, March 2024: GH¢3.32/kg in Gushegu, GH¢7.52/kg in Accra.
Read the reportThe chart needs JavaScript. RN 001 sets out the figures.
Price and analysis for Ghana's agricultural markets, through the 2022 external default, the Domestic Debt Exchange Programme and the disinflation that followed.
A GH¢4.20/kg spread in one commodity in a single month, and a Gushegu–Kumasi discount present in every month both markets report, three of them on fewer than five Gushegu observations. The note tests freight as the explanation, rejects it, and sets out the constraints that hold the markets apart.
Import parity sets the ceiling a coastal feed mill can rationally pay for domestic grain. A 22 per cent cedi appreciation cut that ceiling by 22 per cent with no change in the world price. The note prices the 600 km haul against it, and identifies the exchange rate at which the lane reopens.
The cost of holding grain from the harvest trough to the lean-season peak, decomposed into finance, warehouse and shrink, against the seasonal spread it has to earn. The break-even spread moves almost one for one with the cost of money.
Debt at record levels meeting an inflationary supply shock remains a hypothetical in most markets. In Ghana it is a completed event: inflation above fifty per cent, the cedi roughly halved, external default, and a domestic debt exchange that took a haircut out of ordinary bondholders. Birkdal holds the wholesale price record from that window.
