Abstract
BackgroundFood security has been observed to be severe in northern Ghana than any other area of the country. Though this has been acknowledged, few attempts have been made to curb the situation. One of such intervention areas resides in providing policy-based evidence to guide efforts in fighting this problem. This study employs an ordered probit model using data set from the baseline survey of the USAID’s Feed the Future programme in Ghana to estimate the determinants of food security in northern Ghana. We perform the analysis using a new indicator of food security—the household hunger scale. This measure is different from other household food insecurity indicators since it has been specifically developed and validated for cross-cultural use.ResultsThe estimates show that crop producers, multiple crop producers, yield and commercialization are key policy variables that determine food security. A key policy implication of this result is in tandem with one of the intermediate results of the Ghana Feed the Future Initiative which seeks to increase competitiveness of food value chains through increased productivity and market access.ConclusionsBased on the results, stakeholders should step up efforts to enhance productivity of farm households and provide necessary market infrastructure to boost commercialization, as these are fundamental to ensuring food security.
Highlights
Food security has been observed to be severe in northern Ghana than any other area of the country
This implies that households—(i) who had no food of any kind to eat in the last 4 weeks before the survey and happened often, (ii) who had at least a member go to sleep at night hungry and happened often, and (iii) who had at least a member go a whole day and night without food and happened often—represented only 0.89% of the sample
We applied a new measure of food security, the household hunger scale to analyse the factors influencing food security in the Savannah Accelerated Development Authority (SADA) region, an area described as the hub of food security problems in Ghana, using a secondary data set provided by Monitoring Evaluation and Technical Support Services (METSS)
Summary
Food security has been observed to be severe in northern Ghana than any other area of the country. Van Eeckhout [3] observes the following as the regional distribution of people suffering from hunger: 578 million in the Asia Pacific region; 239 million in sub-Saharan Africa; 53 million in Latin America and the Caribbean; 37 million in North Africa; and 19 million in developed countries. From these statistics, it can be deduced that food insecurity is more pronounced in developing countries and this observation has been supported by a number of empirical findings. FAO, IFAD and WFP [4] note that the vast majority of Nkegbe et al Agric & Food Secur (2017) 6:35 hungry and malnourished people live in developing countries
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