Quality improvement of domestic milled rice is an urgent issue in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) because domestic rice cannot compete with imports in the growing urban market. The gap in quality between imported and domestic rice suggests that rice producers in SSA are not fully capturing the emerging economic opportunities, as urban consumers are willing to pay a premium price for domestically produced and milled rice if its quality is comparable to imports. Therefore, quality improvement of domestic rice is an urgent issue in SSA that needs to be addressed to promote rice production further.
Consumers are concerned with the quality of the milled rice that they purchase and consume. Generally, paddy quality depends on farmers’ rice production practices, including varietal choice and post-harvesting activities-such as drying and storing-as the types of seeds and physical characteristics of paddy are major determinants of milled rice quality.
However, rice farmers are still producing low-quality paddy in SSA. If paddy price does not depend on paddy quality due to the absence of demand for quality rice, it would be natural for farmers not to undertake any efforts to produce higher quality products. Indeed, farmers do not seem to know how to improve paddy quality to obtain higher prices.
Firstly, this is because many rice production projects and extension activities, either foreign or domestic, have focused on enhancing the quantity of rice production rather than quality, and secondly, farmers do not know which particular paddy quality is appreciated by buyers. As it is very costly for farmers to investigate and compare the quality of paddy over space and time, a consistent relationship between price and quality cannot emerge. Thus, we hypothesize that the lack of adequate knowledge is a major constraint on upgrading the rice quality in SSA.
From these discussions, a question arises: if farmers understand that there is an opportunity to sell paddy to buyers that pay a premium for paddy quality, will they improve their paddy quality and sell it to such buyers at a better price? This chapter seeks to answer this question through a randomized controlled trial implemented in the northern region of Ghana. It shows that the provision of information about paddy quality and quality-based pricing improved farmers’ paddy production management and market sales.
Read also: Varieties of Jasmine
This chapter considers rice farmers’ responses to a short training session, which provides them with information about paddy quality improvement and its pricing. We hypothesize that the impact of such new information will influence farmers’ behavior in the following three step-wise aspects: first, farmers will update their knowledge of paddy quality and adopt quality-enhancing practices; second, such practices will improve paddy quality; and third, farmers will sell the improved paddy to buyers at a higher price.
With respect to the first step, this study belongs to the literature on agricultural technology adoption in developing countries. However, most existing studies have focused on quantity-increasing technologies with less focus on quality-enhancing technologies, although the number of studies on the latter issue has been gradually increasing recently. These conditions are similar to our study in northern Ghana.
However, our case differs from theirs in two ways. First, paddy quality is determined by several elements: different kinds of pre- and post-harvest technologies affect paddy quality, which is an important determinant of product (i.e., milled rice) quality. Therefore, the goal of improving paddy quality is much more complicated than with onions or maize. Second, the quality-based pricing we introduce to farmers is a real one that has been used by a large-scale private rice miller in our study site.
As for the second step, it is important to examine whether the quality-enhancing technologies actually improve quality. Our case should fall between the three studies regarding the prevalence of quality-enhancing technologies before the intervention: most rice farmers knew the technologies that may improve paddy quality to some extent, but they did not know precisely what quality parameters would be used to assess the quality of paddy in the market.
On the other hand, in the case of paddy in Ghana, the quality-enhancing technologies include a wide range of technologies from pre-planting to post-harvest/storage, and naturally the quality parameters that each technology improves differ. Because of the complicated relationship between the multiple quality-enhancing technologies and the multiple quality parameters, the impact of quality-enhancing practices on paddy quality may not be so clearly identified.
Read also: How to Make Fried Rice
The third step concerns the relationship between paddy quality and its price. Namely, the question is to what extent paddy quality improvement translates into higher paddy prices. Such consumer preferences for milled rice should be reflected in the price when farmers sell paddy to traders or millers. However, few studies support or deny this conjecture, although anecdotal evidence (either for or against) can be obtained from the field.
Since most paddy rice transactions between farmers and traders are carried out at the farmgate at the study site, collecting paddy samples and recording the paddy price for each transaction in the field is challenging. In addition, since adopting quality-enhancing practices is each farmer’s choice, analyzing the impact of the adoption of such practices on paddy quality and price should lead to an endogeneity problem. Therefore, our approach experimentally introduces information about knowledge of paddy quality and a quality-based pricing scheme to treatment villages.
Overall, our study differs from the three related studies-Bernard et al. (2017), Magnan et al. (2021), and Bold et al. (2022)-in three ways. First, the relationship between production practices and product quality is more complicated in our case than in the case of the three papers. Second, farmers in our study site can choose the type of buyer when they sell paddy, from either those who continue the traditional method of transactions by paying little attention to paddy quality or those who determine the purchase price of paddy depending on its quality. Third, all three papers analyze data from experiments in which they provided direct training or support for adopting quality-enhancing technologies. Our study only provided information on quality-enhancing technologies without providing any direct training or support for production. Thus, our contribution is to investigate the possibility of upgrading the multidimensional quality of staple foods under a natural market environment.
Data sets used in this study were mainly collected as a part of the Coalition for African Rice Development (CARD) project, “An Empirical Analysis on Expanding Rice Production in Sub-Saharan Africa,” funded by the JICA Research Institute. The JICA research team, with researchers from the University for Development Studies (UDS) and the University of Tokyo, conducted data collection.
Bono Region (chiraa): Farmers schooled in modern techniques in rice cultivation
In March 2018, the research team conducted a stratified random sampling of rice farmers in the following way. First, we drew a 54 km by 54 km square on a 1/50,000 scale topographic map, at the center of which there is a large-scale rice milling plant, and identified 435 villages within the square. Second, we divided the square into nine blocks of 18 km by 18 km square and randomly selected 12 villages from each block to obtain 108 sample villages. Finally, we created a list of rice farmers in each sample village and randomly drew ten farmers as sample farmers. This process generated 1,080 randomly selected sample rice farmers. The baseline survey was conducted in August and September 2018.
Read also: Aromatic Coconut Rice
The 2020 State of the Food Security and Nutrition World report suggests that the COVID-19 pandemic may render 83 to 132 million people food insecure. Ghana is a net importer of rice and how the sector responded to the global pandemic has received less traction in the agri-food system literature. The paper employed a qualitative approach involving key informant interviews across 6 regions in Ghana. The study covered 48 Agricultural Extension Agents (AEAs) and Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E) officers, 80 farmers, and 48 market leaders. We use one of the country's main food staple - rice to show the food (in)-security situation during the pandemic.
Kathiresan et al. (2020) posited that rice typically represented a major constituent in household diets. The mention of rice in most African households resonates with foreign rice. This has rendered most African countries to be heavily dependent on foreign rice. But what accounts for the rise in taste and preference for imported rice? Ayeduvor (2018) attributed this to the low quality of locally produced rice. This brings into question the quality of standards and the capacity of rice value chain actors to compete favourably with their foreign counterparts.
COVID-19 ravaged gains made in important economic sectors including agriculture (Ujunwa and Ujunwa, 2021; Egger et al., 2021). The impositions of lockdowns led to temporal price hikes in both countries of origin and destination. Unlike the 2008 world food crisis, COVID-19 disruption is global and concurrent impacting both supply and demand channels. The 2008 food crisis however provided an incentive to boost domestic rice production given the apparent evidence of vulnerabilities witnessed in the global south.
COVID-19 has dire ramifications for the attainment of the Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) - 2, i.e. Evidence suggests that the COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated food insecurity in the global south. Indeed, in Burkina Faso, COVID-19 contributed to worsening food insecurity among poor households in rural and urban spaces (Zidouemba et al., 2020). In Nigeria, more than 50% of households experienced food insecurity due to COVID-19 in both the rural and urban areas involving 1950 households drawn from the General Household Survey-Panel (Ibukun & Abayomi Ayinla Adebayo, 2021). Huss et al. (2021) indicated an increase of 8% from a pre-COVID-19 food in-security rate of 40.8%-48.8% following COVID-19 restriction in Kenya within 30 days.
Countries in West Africa including Ghana continue to be highly dependent on rice imports. Contrary views indicate that no matter how well resourced a country may be, the incursive disruption by COVID-19 presents an inconvenience and potential food insecurity for both developed and developing countries and not just the well-resourced global north. Given the obvious disruption caused by COVID-19 to both supply and demand within food systems, recent attempts have been made to understand the ramifications.
Studies have attempted to proffer an understanding of the issues but from a different perspective with limited use of relevant theoretical frameworks (eg. food security and agri-food system). The literature on COVID-19 and agricultural food systems appears nascent, scarce and scattered. Few studies, for instance, Soullier et al. (2020) examined rice value chain upgrading in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic in West Africa. Rice undoubtedly constitutes a single most important staple in West Africa and by extension Ghana, hence an examination of the crop's resilience in a prolonged global pandemic remains imperative, given the region's high import dependency. So far the few studies that exist, attempts to either examine COVID-19 and agri-food system from just a single theoretical framework.
This article makes three main contributions. First, it gives traction to the conceptual use of combining two theoretical (food security and agri-food system) frameworks in understanding the effects of COVID-19 on the agri-food system. Second, it gives direction to the right use of agri-food system conceptual frameworks in understanding disruptions caused by COVID-19 in the global south. Third, it presents an empirical account of the global south's resilience to supply chain shocks inflicted by COVID-19 using a popular West African food staple crop (rice) as a case study, bringing clarity to the mixed conclusions of COVID-19 effect on the regions agri-food system. The paper aims to examine Ghana's rice sector resilience to COVID-19 effects from a dual theoretical and conceptual framework of food security and food systems.
Specific results showed the occurrence of price hikes during the imposition of lockdown in affected access (effective demand). Rice however remained available during and after the lockdown imposition without shortages. Ghana remained resilient in rice production during the lockdown and post-lockdown period (March-June 2020).
This study takes inspiration from the combined framings employed by the FAO (2008) and Devereux et al. (2020). This is made up of sub-systems (e.g. input, production, waste management etc.) that interact with other major systems (e.g. health, trade, energy, etc.). Conceptualization involving the use of a FS analytical perspective presents a more holistic and systematic approach in dealing with complexities and challenges associated with the agri-food system particularly in developing economies.
Traditional food security system approaches in most SSA countries emphasize a production-focused approach dwelling so much on increasing food supply. FAO (2018) further asserted that a bias towards production neglects other sectors that interact to cause food (in)-security, thus a failure to leverage and rectify anomalies in the agricultural value chain given the complex interactions. A combination of the food security and food system both as a conceptual and theoretical framework stands potentially very useful in understanding the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. In this study, we conceptualize that food security is embedded with four components - availability, access (physical and economic), utilization, and stability. The Food system also encompasses production, processing, distribution, storage and marketing. The results and discussions are therefore foregrounded in these conceptual frameworks.
Popular articles:
tags: #Ghana
