Building resilience to shocks of climate change in Ghana’s cocoa production and its effect on productivity and incomes

Abstract

Climate change is happening and cocoa producers are aware of its causes as well as its effects on their farms. However empirical evidence has revealed that a small number of farmers adopt climate change adaptation technologies to build resilience to the shocks meted out to them by climate change. In this paper, using data from Ghana, we employ propensity score matching to control for selection bias and to analyse adoption of adaptation technologies, its determinants as well as impact on cocoa productivity and incomes. The results showed that most cocoa farmers do not adopt climate change adaptation technologies and for those who adopt some technologies, diversification of income sources was the major innovation. Also, eight factors including gender, age of respondent, involvement in other economic activities, farm size, membership of a farmer association, access to extension service, access to credit as well as annual income from cocoa production were found to significantly influence adoption of climate change adaptation technologies. Finally, cocoa farmers who adopted climate change adaptation technologies recorded significantly higher farm productivities and incomes vis-�a-vis nonadopters. To build resilience, cocoa farmers are encouraged to join farmer based organizations and extension officers should be supported to be able to reach out to farmers to educate them on climate change resilience technologies.