Modeling the Effect of Climate Change and Economic Growth on food Security Indicators in Ghana

Abstract

Hunger is on the rise in almost all sub-regions of Africa, where the prevalence of undernourishment has reached levels of 22.8 percent in sub-Saharan Africa. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to examine the effect of economic growth and climatic factors on food security in Ghana using different functional forms of regression analysis. Annual secondary data on food security indicators, gross domestic product, CO2, rainfall and temperature spanning from 1999 to 2017 were obtained from the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) and World Bank websites. The principal component analysis and regression method were used to reduce the dimensionality of the variable and model the effect of economic growth and climatic factors on food security in Ghana respectively. The dimensions of food availability, stability and utilization were reduced from 5, 6 and 9 variables to 2 variables respectively. However, the dimension of food accessibility was reduced from 3 variables to 1 variable. Food Security Index (FSI) was constructed for each of the food security indicators, and competing models were fitted to the data. It was observed that, GDP has a positive effect on food accessibility, availability, stability and utilization. However, temperature negatively affects food accessibility and stability but a positive effect on food utilization. Rainfall has a negative effect on food stability and CO2 has a negative effect on food availability, stability and utilization.