Forecasting Milled Rice Production in Ghana Using Box-Jenkins Approach

Abstract

The increasing demand for rice in Ghana has been a major concern to the government and other stakeholders. Recent concerns by the coalition for African Rice Development (CARD) to double rice production within ten years in Sub-Saharan countries have triggered the to implement strategies to boost rice production in the government. To fulfill this requirement, there is a need to monitor and forecast trends of rice production in the country. This study employs the Box-Jenkins approach to model milled rice production using time series data from 1960 to 2010. The analysis revealed that ARIMA (2, 1, 0) was the best model for forecasting milled rice production. Although, a ten years forecast with the model shows an increasing trend in production, the forecast value at 2015 (283.16 thousand metric tons) was not good enough to compare with the current production of Nigeria (2700 thousand metric tons), the leading producer of rice of rice in West Africa.