Author
Listed:
- Prince B. Annor
- Simeon Kaitibie
- Michael C. Lyne
Abstract
When farmers implement GlobalGAP they incur specific input costs that arise from quality requirements of the technology. However, due to the difficultly in observing and measuring food quality, previous empirical studies seldom analysed the relationship between quality improvements in food production and total costs of production. They assumed that product quality itself was exogenous and hence had no effect on productive efficiency or cost of production. This study estimates the impact of GlobalGAP on costs of production while accounting for fixed cost improvements and quality endogeneity. Data were obtained from GlobalGAP-certified small-scale pineapple farmers in Ghana. The hypothesis that product quality was exogenous was tested and rejected. Consequently, a quality-adjusted translog cost function was used to identify the main contributors to cost increases on small-scale GlobalGAP-certified pineapple farms. The estimated function exhibited economies of size, implying that most small-scale adopters are unable to increase output and benefit from lower average costs. Production costs arising from improvements in quality imposed by GlobalGAP are most sensitive to changes in plantlet price, followed by wages, agrochemical price and expenditure on capital items. Smaller small-scale farmers are much more sensitive to increases in capital expenditure than are larger small-scale farmers. Key policy recommendations include joint ventures to increase nursery capacity and competition in the market for plantlets, scrutiny of mandatory fees impacting the cost of imported labour-saving inputs, facilitating sharing arrangements between smallholders to lower the cost of on-farm infrastructure, and research to identify constraints preventing certified farmers from exploiting size economies.
Suggested Citation
Prince B. Annor & Simeon Kaitibie & Michael C. Lyne, 2024.
"GlobalGAP compliance costs in Ghana’s small-scale pineapple farming sector,"
Agrekon, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 63(1-2), pages 82-96, April.
Handle:
RePEc:taf:ragrxx:v:63:y:2024:i:1-2:p:82-96
DOI: 10.1080/03031853.2024.2374730
Download full text from publisher
As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.
Corrections
All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:taf:ragrxx:v:63:y:2024:i:1-2:p:82-96. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.
If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.
We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .
If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.
For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Chris Longhurst (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.tandfonline.com/ragr20 .
Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through
the various RePEc services.