Towards Improved Nutrition

This volume presents the outcome of research on strategies to reduce human labour energy input in crop production by smallholder farmers in northern Ghana. The research was carried out under the International PhD Program for Agricultural Economics, Bioeconomy, and Sustainable Food Systems (IPPAE) at the Justus-Liebig University of Giessen, Germany.
Given the increasing evidence of smallholder farmers’ engagement in agricultural cropping work leading to negative nutritional status, this book examines alternative cropping techniques farmers in northern Ghana can adopt to reduce their total labour energy requirement for crop production. The book employs a pre-emptive goal programming approach to model smallholder farm households’ responses to the introduction of different crop production techniques with varying levels of labour energy requirements and financial costs. Farmers’ perceptions about the energy requirements of various crops, and how these perceptions affect cropping decisions are also addressed in this book.