Ghana bagged a little over $2.84 billion in Non-Traditional Exports (NTEs) in 2020, despite the impact of COVID-19 pandemic on global trade.

According to the Ghana Exports Promotions Authority, this is a decline of 1.84% over that of 2019.

Coming at a time COVID-19 had hit the global economy, this could be described as relatively good for the country

The NTEs constituted 19.67% of total exports in 2020.

The fall was due to a downward trend in the performance of the processed and semi-processed products sector, particularly, cocoa butter and canned tuna.

Total exports also fell steeply, relatively to a gentle fall in NTEs during the period under review.

Top 10 leading products show increases in performance

Meanwhile, the top 10 leading products of the entire Non-Traditional sector as well as top 10 leading products of the Processed, Agricultural and Arts & Craft Subsectors showed increases in performance with average growths of 24.11%, 21.28%, 13.49% and 472.81% respectively.

According to GEPA, these positive growth figures associated with the sector relative to traditional sector exhibits buoyancy of the NTEs sector.

The highest contributing subsector, Processed/Semi Processed products, accounted for about 83.71% to total NTEs.

The performance of this subsector experienced a fall of 2.94% in 2020 over 2019 earnings.

The Agricultural subsector recorded a 0.65% rise in its performance from 2019, with a 15.21% contribution to total NTE’s in 2020.

Industrial Art & Craft accounted for 1.08% of total NTEs, depicting an overwhelming increase of 110.88% over the 2019 years earnings.

Cocoa paste also overtook Cocoa butter as the highest earner with natural rubber sheets as the lowest earner of the top 10 leading products.

The first and 10th earned $463.41 million and $73.60 million, respectively. Average earning of the top 10 earners was $170.37 million.

However, total value of the top ten leading products amounted to $ 1.703 billion, representing 59.85% of total NTE earnings for 2020.

Cocoa paste, which was the biggest earner, contributed 16.50% to the total NTEs whiles natural rubber sheets contributed 2.62%.

EU, UK leading destination of NTEs

In 2020 non-traditional export products were exported to 152 countries.

But EU and UK remained the biggest destinations.

The EU & UK markets contributed to 34.35% of the total market by absorbing $977.68 million value of NTEs.

This market value, however, reduced by 11.57% relative to 2019 performance due to depression of demand for cut pineapples, fresh bananas, and canned tuna, as fall outs from disruptions in distribution chains.

Rest of Africa, Other Developed Countries as well as Emerging Countries absorbed 21.46%, 10.93%, 25.73% respectively, of NTEs.

In terms of the countries, Netherlands was the leading destination, accounting for $383.09 million, followed by Burkina Faso in 2nd with $242.7 million and India in 3rd with $178.2 million.

The rest of the top 10 countries were Togo, China, Germany, Switzerland, France, United Kingdom and Spain.

Over the last five years, Ghana’s Non-Traditional Exports grew at an annual average rate of 2.55%.