Farming is the basis for Togo's thriving economy. Major food crops are cassava, yams, maize and millet, plus a large variety of other fruits and vegetables including pineapples, mangoes, papayas and bananas. Cash crops include coffee, cocoa, palm kernels, groundnuts, castor beans, and kapok. Coffee, cotton and cocoa accounts for 85% of agricultural exports, and more than one-third of foreign earnings. Cotton is rapidly becoming a major export, with over 30% of the production going to Brazil alone.
Manufacturing is also important to the economy, with more than 40 medium-sized industries that produce many necessities. There is an oil refinery, a steel mill, two textile plants, three cotton mills, a fruit processing plant, a starch mill, a plastics factory and a palm oil mill, as well as fertilizer and paint industries.
Mining of phosphates, used in the making of chemical fertilizers, is an important part of the economy and Togo is one of the top-ten world producers. High quality marble is also mined at a quarry near Gnaoulou, and it can be seen in many of the hotels in Lome. The most striking example is the Hotel 2 Fevrier, which is faced entirely with local marble.
Tourism is a growing part of the Togolese economic structure, with over 200,000 tourists arrivals annually. The country is becoming a favorite winter sun destination for North Americans and Europeans, thanks to its easy access by air and well developed travel and hotel industries.
Lome is the major banking and financial center in West Africa. With the opening of ECOWAS bank, the private sector development bank sponsored by the Economic Community of West African States, Lome now has more than a dozen national and international banks, employing more than 1300 people, over 90% of them Togolese, making banking a major sector of the economy.
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Update Feb 05 2001