Forecasting Milled Rice Production in Ghana Using Box-Jenkins Approach

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