In sub-Sahara Africa, sustainable agricultural sector has been trumpeted as the surest way for livelihood transformation through poverty reduction and ensuring food and nutritional security. Using mango farming as a case study, the paper determines how sustainable agriculture can be achieved by examining the environmental, social and economic impacts of mango farms in a rural setting. Qualitative and quantitative approaches were used to collect primary data from 400 respondents from the Shai Osu-Doku and Yilo-Krobo Districts of the Greater Accra and Eastern Regions respectively of Ghana.

Although Ghana Cocoa Board (COCOBOD) promotes technical change in cocoa farming with innovative technologies and input support, crop productivity is better advanced by improving on the efficiency of input use by farmers. This study thereby investigates the technical efficiency of cocoa farmers in Ghana. The study uses cross sectional field data covering Western North, Ashanti, Eastern, Volta and Brong-Ahafo regions of Ghana on a sample of 899 cocoa farmers and adopts Meta frontier stochastic frontier analysis to derive production efficiencies for each region.

The promotion of cocoa farm productivity has necessitated the intensification of input use with ensuing loss of natural pollinators. Ghana Cocoa Board’s (COCOBOD) remedy to declining pollinator population is addressed in the rolling out of hand pollination in the 2016/17 crop year. Applying contingent valuation on field data covering 608 farmers in five cocoa growing regions, we estimate the value of pollinator services to the cocoa industry in Ghana and farmers willingness to pay for the service.

AbstractAdequate flow of appropriate information to farmers is vital for accelerating the uptake of modern agricultural technologies and improving access to markets, all of which are important for the transformation of African economies. Yet there is limited evidence regarding how information should be disseminated to farmers to achieve the needed impact. Should ICT‐based approaches be used together with traditional methods, or should they be used alone?

This paper uses panel data and qualitative interviews from southwestern Ghana to analyse farmers’ heterogeneous oil palm marketing decisions and the effect on household welfare. We show that despite the supposed benefits that smallholders could derive from participation in global agribusiness value chains via formal contracts, such arrangements are rare although two of Ghana’s ‘big four’ industrial oil palm companies are located in the study area. In the absence of formal contracts, farmers self-select into four main oil palm marketing channels (OPMCs).