Abstract
The promotion of farm innovations, such as mineral fertiliser, is one of the strategies for attaining the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of zero hunger and poverty alleviation in developing countries. However, the adoption of mineral fertilisers has been low in Africa, particularly in Ghana. The present study not only analyses the impact of mineral fertiliser on the land productivity of rice farmers in northern Ghana but also determines factors that are associated with the adoption of mineral fertilisers using a primary dataset from 470 rice farmers. The study employs endogenous switching regression and propensity score matching approaches in the empirical analysis. The result shows that the adoption of mineral fertiliser tends to significantly increase the land productivity of rice farmers by improving soil fertility and making nutrients readily available to rice crops. The empirical finding further indicates that the adoption of mineral fertiliser is positively influenced by land area, seed, improved rice variety and row planting whereas farmers’ location and market distance exert negative effects on mineral fertiliser adoption. To maximise the land productivity of farmers, it is imperative for agricultural policy interventions to promote mineral fertiliser application by targeting key policy variables such as getting fertiliser input market outlets closer to farmers.
Highlights
Achieving the sustainable development goals (SDGs) of zero hunger and poverty alleviation has become a policy priority for most governments in developing countries, notably those in Africa.land degradation in the form of soil erosion and nutrient depletion is increasingly prevalent in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), in Ghana, thereby hampering the attainment of the aforementioned Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)
The covariance term for the rice yield of adopters is statistically significant at 1%, implying self-selection into the adoption of mineral fertiliser by the rice farmers and that the adoption of mineral fertiliser may not exhibit the same effect on adopters, if they choose to adopt
The value of the chi-square statistics of 25.12 is statistically different from zero, suggesting that the independence assumption of the selection and outcome equations must be rejected at 1% level and which justifies the appropriateness of using the full information maximum likelihood estimation (FIMLE) to estimate jointly the parameters of the models
Summary
Land degradation in the form of soil erosion and nutrient depletion is increasingly prevalent in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), in Ghana, thereby hampering the attainment of the aforementioned SDGs. In developing countries, it is estimated that about 60% of the cultivated soils are associated with nutrient deficiencies and toxicities, which cause biotic plant stress [1,2,3]. The local rice production has been unable to consistently meet domestic demand. This compels the country to rely hugely on importation to meet the ever-increasing
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