1.2 Problem Statements

Agricultural issues have been the major concern of the globe. The intensity of these concerns has placed agricultural issues on top of international agenda.

There are numerous problems affecting agricultural supply chains. These problems have rendered a variety of setbacks to most agricultural industries. For example，Ghana’s pineapple industry obtained an overwhelming market share of the European market from the year 1980’s to 2004[12]，but it was overtaken by countries such as Costa Rica and has not recovered by now.

The source of risks that contributed to this major setback in the chain’s performance includes market related risks （change of quality preference from smooth cayenne to MD2 variety）. Also managerial and operational related risks are factors to the setbacks since managers and operators were reluctant to respond to customers demand quality.

Even though agriculture is the backbone of many countries in the globe，literature concerning agricultural supply chains is limited. Another alarming area in the agricultural supply chain that lacks literature is risks in the chain and their impact on the chain’s performance.

Although the benefits of effectively managing risks in the supply chain to firms and national economies as a whole are numerous，not much research focuses on agricultural supply chain risk management in Ghana. Meanwhile agricultural industries continue to contribute about 25%-38% of the country’s GDP annually and employ more than 40%-60% of the population[13].

The perishability nature of agriculture produce involved in the chain，the pressure on global firms operating in an unstable environment to meet global competitive market as well as the possible detrimental effect of risks associated with supply chain management[14][15][16][17][18][19] signal serious problems to the future of agricultural industries in the globe.

Risk management is associated with cost. Therefore there is the need to allocate scare resources to effectively manage risks in the agricultural supply chain. However，agricultural supply chain lacks empirical evidence of the impact of risks on the chains’ performance. Therefore it makes difficult for participants in the chain to assign scare resources to manage these risks. Hence，the need to investigate the impact of risks and risk mitigation on the agricultural supply chain to aid in effective management of the chain is urgent. Thus，this research moves a step further to fill this gap.