Determinants of an extended metric of agricultural commercialization in Ghana
No Thumbnail Available
Date
2024
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Scientific African
Abstract
For smallholder farmers in sub-Saharan Africa, increasing productivity and agricultural
commercialization are mooted as one of the pillars for agricultural development. However, the
measurement of agricultural commercialization has been restricted to the household crop
commercialization index (HCCI) that focuses on crops neglecting livestock. This study develops
an extended metric of agricultural commercialization named household crop-livestock commer
cialization index (HCLCI), which combines crop and livestock commercialization with the
argument that it is superior to the overly used HCCI. Fractional regression is used to estimate the
determinants of the extended metric using secondary and primary data from Ghana. Results
indicate that agricultural commercialization is low when examined with the HCCI and the HCLCI.
However, the HCLCI (at 26.44 % and 29.76 %, respectively, for the GLSS7 and primary data) is
much lower relative to the HCCI (at 35.20 % and 38.24, respectively) but higher than the live
stock commercialization index (10.93 % and 8.21 %, respectively). The underlying simultaneous
factors that boost agricultural commercialization are infrastructure variables (i.e., road, market,
transport, and bank), institutional variable (i.e., agricultural cooperatives) and scale of produc
tion (i.e., land endowment and crop production diversity). These findings imply that Ghana needs
to invest in infrastructure and farmer institutional development to boost agricultural
commercialization.
Description
Research Article
Keywords
Agricultural commercialization, Household crop commercialization index, Household crop-livestock commercialization