Assessment of Household Food Security in Fish Farming Communities in Ghana

Akua S Akuffo,Kwamena K Quagrainie

doi:10.3390/su11102807

Abstract

The Government of Ghana and international NGOs have been encouraging the adoption of fish farming to alleviate poverty and food insecurity through training workshops, financial contributions and creation of a fisheries ministry. Nevertheless, there is no study on how these efforts have influenced the household’s welfare, particularly their nutritional quality. Based on this, our objective is to identify the ways through which fish farming impacts the household’s nutritional quality. We hypothesize that engaging in fish farming will increase steady income flow and access to fish for the household’s direct consumption. We adopted the Propensity Score Matching (PSM) approach in a logit framework to achieve this objective and address the endogeneity from the bias of self -selection by creating a statistically similar-looking control group. The results suggest that fish farming households have higher nutritional quality and frequency of food consumed than the non-fish farming households through direct consumption. The probability of adopting fish farming increases with wealth, location, ecological zone and household size but decreases with household income per capita. The average effect of adopting fish farming on household nutritional quality is 15.5 Food Consumption Score points. Policies that encourage women to engage in not only fish processing, but production as well are advised.

Highlights

Fish farming is becoming very popular in developing countries because of its ability to improve the welfare of less wealthy and landless-food insecure households through employment, income generation and nutrition from direct consumption [1]
The study contributes to the literature by evaluating the impact of participating in fish farming on the nutritional quality of households in Ghana
We evaluated both direct impact pathways and indirect impact pathways in this study using the Food Consumption Score (FCS) as a proxy measure for food security

Summary

Introduction

Fish farming is becoming very popular in developing countries because of its ability to improve the welfare of less wealthy and landless-food insecure households through employment, income generation and nutrition from direct consumption [1]. In Africa and Asia, several developmental interventions related to fish consumption, aquaculture, and capture fisheries have aimed at improving the nutritional status of households through direct dietary intake, production and increase in household income [1]. The ministry, with support from the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), developed a Ghana National Aquaculture Development Plan (GNADP) to increase profitability and production up to 100,000 metric tons by 2016 [3]. The GFADP serves as a roadmap by which aquaculture will contribute to poverty alleviation, food and nutritional security, employment generation, increased income and economic development as part of the government’s efforts to reduce poverty under the Ghana Poverty Reduction Strategy II (GPRS II) [4] and the Millennium Development Goals. The Ghana Association of Women Entrepreneurs (GAWE) and Rural Wealth (RW) are among the few local non-governmental organizations that are actively engaged in aquaculture projects [6]

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Conclusion