Building resilience to shocks of climate change in Ghana’s cocoa production and its effect on productivity and incomes
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Date
2020
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Publisher
Elsevier
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.
Description
This article is published in Elsevier
Keywords
Cocoa production, Climate change, Adaptation technologies, Adoption, Resilience