Crop Price Indemnified Loans for Farmers: A Pilot Experiment in Rural Ghana

This paper presents the results of a financial intervention using loans, of which 50% is forgiven given a drop in crop prices below a certain threshold, in Ghana intended to investigate 1) the role of crop-price risk in reducing demand for credit among farmers and 2) how risk mitigation changes farmers' investment decisions. After baseline survey was taken and farmers were randomized into treatment and control, 20 meetings were set up in order to inform maize and garden egg farmers in the five villages of new loan product that would be distributed conditional on investment in their farms. 169 farmers attended the meetings, of which 91 were maize farmers and 78 were garden egg farmers. Two sets of meetings were in place, 10 that offered a standard loan product and 10 that offered a loan product that had a 50% forgiveness mechanism built in if average crop prices fell below a certain threshold (set at the 10th percentile for historical garden egg prices and the 7th percentile for maize prices). The average loan size for all loans was approximately 238 GHS, or 159 USD. Farmers were not informed of what type of meeting they would attend, and were unaware that there was a difference between the meetings prior to attending. Outcome measures were types of individuals that are likely to take up the loan under both the control and treatment condit ions, and the impact that the indemnified loan had on investment and profits versus the standard loan.