Food affordability and moral impartiality in Ghana, A Singerian analysis of households in the Central Region
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.51867/AQSSR.3.4.68Keywords:
Cost of a Healthy Diet, Distributive Justice, Equal Consideration of Interests, Food Affordability, Ghana, Social Protection TargetingAbstract
Ghana's national Cost of a Healthy Diet bulletins exclude the Central Region for want of price data. Three things are therefore unknown: what an adequate diet costs there, how that cost falls across households, and whether the resulting distribution can be defended. Anchored in Singer's principle of equal consideration of interests and his preventable harm argument, and tested against the partiality and institutional critiques, this study addressed all three. A convergent mixed methods design priced twelve foods weekly for twelve months in four markets, yielding 1,728 vendor quotations, surveyed 640 food decision makers across six districts, and interviewed 48 of them along with 24 traders. An adequate diet cost GH¢10.84 per person per day and moved 30.6% between its December low and its June peak. After essential nonfood spending, 47.3% of households could not meet it. The poorest fifth carried 58.2% of the shortfall, a concentration index of −0.594, while the food budget share stayed flat across the income distribution and public transfers reached the richest quintile more often than the poorest. The study fills a documented monitoring gap and offers the first evidence conditioned ethical evaluation of food affordability in Ghana. Equal consideration, we argue, survives as a standard for judging food pricing once extended by an institutional duty to measure and a friction adjusted delivery rule. Eligibility should rest on resources remaining after essential nonfood spending rather than on food share thresholds, and regional price collection needs statutory protection.
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