The Effects of the Ghana School Feeding Programme on Local Rice Production: A Case Study of Selected Districts in Northern Ghana

The Ghana School Feeding Programme (GSFP) is the local version of the Home-Grown School Feeding Programme (HGSP) that has a mandate to give one hot meal a day to school children in public schools from kindergarten through to primary six. Launched in 2005 the programme has the goal of contributing to poverty reduction and increased food security in Ghana. One of the key objectives of the programme is to boost domestic food production by purchasing locally produce foodstuffs and providing a sustainable market for local food producers in the community. To analyse the effect of the programme on rice production in four districts in the Northern Region of Ghana, a formal cross section survey of 80 small holder rice farmers and 40 GSFP caterers, across the four districts was conducted. The translog production function was applied to analyse the programme's effect on rice output while the probit model was used to analyse the factors influencing rice farmers to supply to the programme on one hand and the factors affecting caterer's decision to purchase rice from the rice farmers on the other. The results from the analysis of the production function shows that the coefficients of farm labour, farm size, and fertilizer application were highly significant in increasing farmers' output. While access to the GSFP had a positive influence on output it was statistically insignificant. The results also show that majority of GSFP caterers buy rice from local millers and the market. The factors which had significant influence on the caterers to buy from the rice farmer include availability of storage facility, farmer's willingness to process the paddy rice and sell on credit, price of milled rice, and proximity of rice farmers. The major conclusion of the study is that the effect of the programme on rice farmers output was not significant. This was attributed to poor linkage between the farmers and the programme even though about 100 percent of rice consumed by the GSFP is produced locally.