Smallholder farmers’ preferences for improved cocoa technologies in Ghana

Abstract

The cocoa (Theobroma cocoa Linn.) is the main foreign exchange earner and the backbone of the Ghanaian economy. However, over the years the production levels begun to dwindle and in the attempt to resuscitate the industry, the government introduced a technology package and social intervention to address it. The technology package consists of 25 unique attributes (classes of characteristics or components), of which some farmers adopted test part of it and left out others. The study seeks to determine socioeconomic factors influencing farmers’ choice decision process and preferences for attributes of the technology packages. The results from the multinomial logit regression model revealed that availability of labour, gender, farm size, age of the cocoa farm, years of cocoa farm ownership and number of cocoa bags harvested per annum are the key variables influencing farmers’ choices. Moreover, farmers who have long experience in cocoa cultivation and have had some form of training on the technology packages have high probability to adopt entire categories or classes of the technology package. Thus, institutional policy arrangement which emphasizes on training and targeting experience farmers will go a long way to enhance production level in the country