Inorganic Fertilizer Adoption And Technical Efficiency Of Cocoa Farmers In The Western Region Of Ghana

ABSTRACT

Low output of cocoa has resulted in Ghana losing out to Cote d‟Ivoire as the leading producer. The aim of this study was to explore farm households‟ adoption of inorganic fertilizer and technical efficiency, using cross-sectional data collected from 305 cocoa producing households in the Western Region of Ghana. The Heckman two-stage model was used for both the discrete decision to adopt fertilizer and intensity of fertilizer use while the stochastic frontier framework was used to estimate the productivity and technical efficiency of cocoa production. The regression on propensity score was used to evaluate the effect of fertilizer adoption on technical efficiency. The majority (75%) of the cocoa farmers in the study area adopted fertilizer. The results from the Heckman twostage model revealed that fertilizer adoption and the intensity of adoption were significantly influenced by socioeconomic, farm-specific and institutional factors. Whereas the stochastic frontier analysis showed that farm size, quantity of fertilizer, quantity of fungicides, affected cocoa output significantly; sex, years of crop farming, farm size, farm assets, income from other crops, benefits gained from NGO services and hired labour affect farmers‟ technical efficiency. Moreover, the probability of fertilizer adoption was estimated to have a positive and significant effect on farm-level technical efficiency. The result further revealed that technical efficiency ranges between 0.20 and 0.99 with a mean score of 0.75. Thus, 25% of cocoa farm output was lost due to farmers‟ technical inefficiency. Returns-to-scale was 0.98, indicating that cocoa farm operations were in the stage II of the production function and that farmers, can still do more to increase output. The study concluded that policy interventions should directly target the adoption of inorganic fertilizer and intensity of use by making adequate fertilizer available to farmers at all times of the cropping season in other to achieve higher yield.