Production technology, efficiency, and productivity of cereal farms: Prospects for enhancing farm performance in Ghana

Abstract

Over the past three decades, the cereal subsector in Ghana has contributed immensely to food security in the country. However, limited evidence exists on the production performance of this subsector, particularly in terms of heterogeneities across agro-ecological zones. This paper analyzes the production technology and performance of the cereal subsector in Ghana using a nationally representative data set from 26,449 cereal farms and the meta-stochastic frontier approach. The empirical results suggest that the estimated factor inputs contribute substantially to cereal output, with land and seed exerting the highest impacts across all agro-ecological zones. The evidence further shows that the agro-ecology of cereal farms plays a crucial role in the performance of the subsector. The mean technical efficiency estimates strongly suggest that cereal farms in all agro-ecologies exhibit some degrees of production inefficiency. The findings further reveal total output from the meta-frontier to be much superior to those generated by cereal farms in all agro-ecologies of Ghana, indicating the existence of opportunities for cereal output gains in all agro-ecologies. We find heterogeneities in farm management practices and production technology across the various crops and agro-ecological zones to be relevant sources for cereal productivity growth in Ghana.

Starchy staples production shortfalls in Ghana: Technical inefficiency effects outweigh technological differences across ecologies

“…This is followed by the Transition zone (0.90), the Forest zone (0.87), and then Coastal Savannah (0.84). The TGR for cassava is relatively high when compared to 0.75 for tomato [23] and 0.74 for rice [11].…”

“…Therefore, we considered all possible distributions but eventually had to settle on a half-normal distribution (i.e., u ijt � N þ ½0; expðw ijt α j Þ�), since the truncated normal and exponential distributions presented issues of convergence. Following Tsiboe et al [23], w ijt contained farmer characteristics (age, education, and gender), institutional factors (land ownership, credit, and extension), a trend and a constant term. Given the SF production function for the j th agroecology, the "pure farmer technical efficiency" (TE) of the i th farmer is calculated as:…”

“…Several studies relevant to Ghanaian agriculture have investigated the primary drivers of resource use efficiency for rice [7][8][9][10][11][12], maize [12][13][14][15], legumes [16][17][18], cocoa [19][20][21][22], and vegetables [23], but with little attention on production shortfalls. An important category of crops that has received less attention despite the important role they play in the food security of households is the starchy staples.…”

“…A few studies like [24] analyzed starchy staples data for only one season, paying no attention to the possibility of heterogeneous technology adoption within Ghana. Like their peers cultivating vegetables [23], cereals [11,12,14], and legumes [25], starchy staples farmers could be operating under different technologies constrained by the ecology and/or enabling environment. According to the literature, failure to account for these technological differences could lead to falsely attributing production shortfalls due to technology gaps to technical inefficiency [26].…”

“…In principle, the starchy staples have received little attention, against the backdrop of the critical roles these crops play, and the significant yield gaps observed in practice. Except for a few studies [12,22,23,25,27], all efficiency studies in Ghana used data based on a single season, and data size is limited to a few villages or at best a region. This data limitation and lack of locational heterogeneity masks important lessons that could emerge from analyzing a more comprehensive and heterogeneous sample.…”