Six in every 10 cedis that banks have lent to farmers, foresters and fishermen have gone bad, Bank of Ghana data show, as lenders pull back from agriculture even as the rest of the economy enjoys one of its strongest credit booms in years.

The non-performing loan ratio for the agriculture, forestry and fishing sector rose to 60.9 per cent in August 2026, from 54.2 per cent a year earlier, according to the central bank’s September Monetary Policy Report. The central bank singled out agriculture as the exception to a broad-based improvement in asset quality across the banking industry.

The deterioration comes as banks are lending more freely than at any time in recent years. Gross loans and advances rose 34.6 per cent to GH¢128.3 billion in the year to August, and real private sector credit growth, after adjusting for inflation, reached 29.0 per cent, up from just 1.7 per cent a year earlier.

Agriculture has been left behind. The sector’s share of total bank credit fell to 3.1 per cent in August, from 4.3 per cent a year earlier, according to the report. On those figures, lending to agriculture amounted to about GH¢4 billion, slightly less than a year ago, even as total lending grew by more than GH¢30 billion.

At the current bad-loan rate, about GH¢2.4 billion of that is non-performing.

The money is there. Bank deposits grew 20.7 per cent to GH¢362.2 billion in the year to August, and banks held GH¢190.8 billion in investments, mostly government bills and securities, about one and a half times the value of all their loans. Lending to agriculture is equivalent to just over 1 per cent of the deposits sitting in the banking system.

Instead, banks have turned to sectors they see as safer. The share of credit going to mining and quarrying almost doubled to 6.3 per cent from 3.2 per cent, roughly GH¢8 billion, as high gold prices made miners more attractive borrowers. Construction’s share rose to 11.3 per cent, while services took the largest slice at 37.7 per cent.

Households are also finding it easier to borrow. The central bank’s August credit conditions survey found banks easing their stance on mortgages and consumer credit, and expecting to ease further. New vehicle registrations jumped 52.7 per cent in the first seven months of the year. By contrast, the survey found that lending standards for small and medium-sized enterprises, where many agribusinesses sit, “remained relatively tight.”

The squeeze on farm credit cuts against one of the government’s flagship policies. The Feed Ghana Programme, launched under the Agriculture for Economic Transformation Agenda, aims to boost food production, supply raw materials to agro-processing factories and reduce the country’s reliance on imported food.

The programme covers 22 priority commodity value chains and includes a Feed the Industry component to link farmers with processors, and the Ministry of Trade, Agribusiness and Industry has acquired 40,000 acres of land at Yeji for commercial farming. But farming at commercial scale needs working capital, and the banking data suggest that finance is shrinking rather than expanding. Agriculture’s growth has also slowed sharply this year.

The Bank of Ghana’s own push to clean up bank balance sheets could deepen the problem. The central bank has directed lenders to bring their non-performing loan ratios below 10 per cent by the end of December. For banks racing to meet that deadline, a sector where six in 10 loans are already bad is the last place to expand.

The industry’s headline improvement also deserves closer reading. While the overall bad-loan ratio has fallen, the stock of non-performing loans actually rose slightly to GH¢20.2 billion from GH¢19.8 billion, which the central bank attributed largely to exchange rate effects on foreign currency loans. Much of the decline in the ratio reflects the surge in new lending rather than a fall in bad debts.

Farming has long been considered high-risk by Ghanaian lenders, exposed to erratic rainfall, pests, poor storage, weak title to land and volatile prices. Those risks are rising again, with the central bank flagging expected El Niño conditions in the last quarter of 2026 as a threat to inflation.

The central bank’s report described asset quality vulnerabilities across the industry as “elevated” despite the improvements, and called for stronger credit risk management in line with its directive on bad loans.