Towards a sustainable food production: modelling the impacts of climate change on maize and soybean production in Ghana.

Abstract

The Ghanaian economy relies heavily on maize and soybean production. The entire maize and soybean production system is low-tech, making it extremely susceptible to environmental factors. As a result, climate change and variability have an influence on agricultural production, such as maize and soybean yields. Therefore, the study’s ultimate purpose was to analyze the influence of CO2 emissions, precipitation, domestic credit, and fertilizer consumption on maize and soybean productivity in Ghana by utilizing the newly constructed dynamic simulated autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) model for the period 1990 to 2020. The findings indicated that climate change enhances maize and soybean yields in Ghana in both the short run and long run. Also, the results from the frequency domain causality showed that climate change causes maize and soybean yield in the long-run. These outcomes were robust to the use of the ordinary least squares estimator and the impulse response technique. The findings show that crop and water management strategies, as well as information availability, should be considered in food production to improve resistance to climate change and adverse climatic circumstances.