Background: Theoretically, social climate and social networking which may affect attitudes, motivations, and readiness towards quality improvement and rewards, influence the adoption decision process by possibly modifying the risk behaviour/attitudes of individuals. Thus for effective promotion of agricultural technologies among farmers in Africa, it is necessary to understand the social context within which risk attitudes are formed and social participation decisions are made. The study, therefore, employed the recursive bivariate endogenous switching probit model to examine how risk attitudes of farmers are shaped through social interactions in the information and communication networks of farmers to influence their technology adoption decisions. Here, the empirical application was done with the contextual case of agriculture intensification technologies in the Root and Tuber Improvement and Marketing Programme (RTIMP) introduced to smallholder cassava farmers in Ghana. This paper makes a contribution to recent advances in the empirical analysis of impact where anticipated problems posed by unobserved confounders are accounted for. This was possible since the approach used allows for the estimation of the treatment effect of endogenous risk attitude variable of interest on farmers’ adoption decisions. Results: The study found that the effectiveness and usefulness of social interactions as well as a high degree of trust by cassava farmers in their social networks have higher tendencies to lower the degree of risk aversion behaviour of the farmers to significantly influence RTIMP Technologies adoption decisions positively. The ATE estimate confirms that there has been a significant increase of 38% probability in the likelihood of adopting agricultural intensification technologies in the RTIMP attributable to the non-risk aversion attitudes of cassava farmers. The cassava farmers’ risk attitudes were found to be significantly influenced by the effectiveness and usefulness of social interactions, and a high degree of trust as well as age, frequency of extension services, access to credit, and revenue. Conclusion: By implication, attempts to introduce innovations to improve agricultural commodities value chains that target farmers must pay particular attention to the information and communication network to ensure the effectiveness and usefulness of information dissemination to farmers in an honest manner, so as to build trust; which will go a long way to reduce doubts and uncertainties (function of risk aversion). This will help achieve higher innovation adoption impacts thereby resulting in attaining the overall deliverable objectives of agricultural innovations.

Purpose: The consequences of extreme climatic events that threaten food security have created the urgent need to properly adopt climate-smart adaptation techniques to improve productivity. The study examined the sustainability responses to climate-smart adaptation and the implication it has for explaining the food security situations among farm households in the Central Region of Ghana.Design/methodology/approach: We estimated Heckit treatment effect model to analyse cross-sectional data collected from randomly selected farmers in the Central Region.Findings: Analysis of farm sustainability index suggests that farmers' agricultural practices in response to climate change are lowly or moderately sustainable. We further found that while majority of the farm households are severely food insecure or food insecure with hunger, only about one-third are food insecure without hunger and the remaining few being food secure. The sustainability of farm practices is being impacted by the farmers’ choice of climate smart adaptation measures at the farm level. Consequently, the farm households' food security situation is found to be improved when sustainable farming practices are employed in the face of managing climate change effects.Practical implications: Conclusions drawn from the study findings give rooms for policy implications that suggest responsibilities for policymakers, farmers and other stakeholders to promote CSA practices in food crop production in Ghana. These policy implications will contribute to improve crop productivity, increase incomes and thus enhance food security among farm families. Awareness campaign about benefits of CSA practices and technologies need to be strengthened among farmers in Ghana by government and NGOs that matter in promoting farm resilience to climate change. Given the important impacts of sustainable farm practices on household food security situation, policies that seek to build the adaptive capacity of farmers to climate vulnerability impacts should take into consideration the sustainability dimensions of the adaptation and mitigation measures to be advocated for use at farm levels.Originality/value: Our paper contributes to literature knowledge on climate-smart adaptation practices effect on food security as evidenced in some recent literature. The paper makes a unique contribution by highlighting the food security implication of the sustainability impact of CSA practices, thereby exploring sustainability as an impact pathway between climate smart adaptations practices and food security in a developing country like Ghana. We approached our study aiming at making new contribution by introducing in the study implementation a quasi-experimental research design which future studies on impacts of climate smart adaptation practices can replicate.

This study focuses on evaluating the technical and scale efficiencies of smallholder pineapple farmers in Ghana’s Central Region. We surveyed 320 participants selected using random sampling and applied an input-oriented Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) method to gauge their technical, pure, and scale efficiencies. Our findings indicate that the mean technical efficiency among these farmers is 0.505, with individual scores ranging from 0.079 to 1.000. Notably, 90.82% of the farmers are operating below maximum efficiency levels, suggesting a potential input reduction of up to 49.5% while maintaining current production levels. Relaxing the assumption of constant returns under Variable Returns to Scale (VRS) conditions reveals a notable improvement in technical efficiency, with 10.82% more farmers achieving optimal efficiency levels. Furthermore, our analysis highlights scale inefficiencies, with 67.26% of farmers operating below optimal scale levels. By increasing production by 22.8%, these scale-inefficient farmers could enhance their efficiency and productivity within existing technological frameworks. These findings underscore the importance of collaborative efforts among policymakers, practitioners, and stakeholders within the agricultural value chain to implement interventions such as improving access to technology and innovation for smallholder farmers and making necessary investments in farmer education and training programs to enhance both technical and scale efficiencies in Ghana’s pineapple sector. Such initiatives can drive sustainable growth, improve farmers’ livelihoods, and bolster the sector’s overall competitiveness.

Governments budget cuts to free agricultural extension services in developing countries have led to advocacy for development and implementation of cost-effective extension services to be partly paid for by beneficiary farmers. Accordingly, understanding farmers’ preferences and willingness to pay is essential for successful implementation of any such cost-sharing extension service schemes; but empirical studies to support cost-sharing extension service schemes in the Ghanaian cocoa sector is hard to find. The study contributes to the knowledge gap by examining key drivers of cocoa farmers’ preferences and willingness to pay for a climate-smart extension service using discrete choice experiment data which was analysed with a mixed logit model. Data was collected from 720 cocoa farmers who were sampled using multistage sampling process. The study finds that farmers have significant preference for the climate-smart extension service, with a marginal willingness to pay of approximately GH¢ 15.15 for improvements in product attributes. Farmers’ preferred product attributes include in-person accessibility, advanced climate-smart content, flexible demand-based delivery and high service reliability, taking into consideration price affordability. Additionally, willingness to pay is significantly influenced by perceived service quality, rainfall and temperature variability, climate change impact, age, education, access to credit, and farm income. The study recommends that extension service providers and policymakers should focus on the identified climate-smart cocoa extension service attributes preferred by farmers and the significant determinants of the farmers’ willingness to pay when developing and implementing climate-smart extension services to enhance cocoa farmers’ resilience to climate risks.

Along the maize value chain in Ghana are a wide range of risks that confront actors; the risk chain actors' face include production and marketing risks. Accordingly, risk management, which has become an integral part of maize value chain activities, is challenged with several factors, some of which are economic, institutional, social and behavioral factors. This study posits that risk preferences/behavior of farm decision-makers in the maize value chain have empirical importance for economic and policy analysis. Thus, an experimental gambling approach was used to elicit the risk aversion behavior of respondents (farmers). Here, the respondents' risk aversion behavior over varying game levels was investigated. The multinomial logit model was used to investigate endogenous and exogenous factors explaining the risk behavior. The data were obtained by interviewing 220 maize farmers who were sampled with a two-stage sampling procedure. This study revealed that most of the farmers in the study area exhibited risk aversion behavior. About 33% of farmers showed extreme risk aversion behavior at the games’ lowest level and increased to 45% as the game level rose. It was also found that sex, age, level of formal education, access to credit, access to the storage facility, household size, farm size and the number of extension visits to the farm significantly explained the risk aversion behavior the maize farmers exhibited. Because farmers are risk-averse and become more risk-averse as stakes become high, any farm innovations to be introduced to them must be implemented gradually, especially with the low-income farmers. It is also critical to make risk mitigation 'handles' available to farmers so that they can rely on them during times of risk.