Food-cash crop diversification and farm household welfare in the Forest-Savannah Transition Zone of Ghana

Despite the importance of crop diversification in enhancing household income and food security, significant knowledge gaps remain in terms of the precursors and actual impacts of diversified food-cash crop systems. Thus, we assessed the determinants of food-cash crop diversification, and its impacts on the income and food security of farmers using survey data from 408 randomly-selected households in the Forest-Savannah Transition Zone of Ghana. The study employs the multinomial logistic model (MNL) to examine farm households’ decision to practice food-cash crop diversification, while the inverse probability weighted regression adjustment (IPWRA) was performed to determine the impact of the diversification on food security and household income. Diversification of cash and food crops impacted positively on household annual crop income and on food security, and these positive impacts further increased as the diversity of tree cash cropping increased, with the addition of cocoa and/or cashew. Our findings emphasise the importance of income from tree cash crops, and complementarities between cash crops and food crop production in explaining the food security merits of diversified food-cash crop systems. Overall, a food-crop-farmers’ decision to diversify into cocoa and cashew in Ghana was significantly predicted by farming experience of the household head, and farm characteristics of the household (fallow land availability, land ownership and livestock ownership), as well as economic (annual crop income and access to off-farm income) and institutional (access to extension) factors. These results imply that enhancing farmers’ access to financial and technical support services and promoting livestock farming could encourage the adoption of diversified cropping systems. However, since land ownership rights in sub-Saharan Africa are oftentimes unclear, contested or poorly enforced, pro-poor and equitable land tenure reforms would be indispensable in promoting diversification into tree cash crops by subsistence farm households.