Impacts of Participation in Ghana’s Fertilizer Subsidy Program (GFSP) on multiple dimensions of food security and resilience

Despite the huge financial cost of Ghana’s fertilizer subsidy program (GFSP), limited empirical studies exist on GFSP’s contribution to small farm households’ welfare, especially on the four dimensions of household food security and resilience. Employing two rounds of pooled data from the Ghana Living Standard Survey (GLSS), the study determines the causal effects of participation in GFSP on all the four dimensions of household food security (availability, access, utilization and stability) for maize growing households. The study employed propensity score matching techniques (nearness neighbour matching, propensity score matching without replacement, inverse probability weighting and inverse probability weighted regression adjustment) for estimation. The results are consistent across the propensity score matching techniques. The overall average treatment effect of the GFSP is positive and statistically significant for food availability and food access. The GFSP increased maize yield/ Ha between 29 to 34 percent at p<0.01 among program beneficiaries. For food access, the GFSP increased household consumption expenditure by 37 percent at p<0.01. The effect of GFSP on the stability dimension of food security measured by the availability of maize in stock at the time of data collection was also positive, though weaker statistically against robustness checks. There was however negative effect of GFSP on food utilization (measured by household food consumption score).