Kimseyinga Savadogo

Policy Reforms and Sustainable Agricultural Intensification in Africa

African farmers have traditionally pursued shifting cultivation in response to population growth and declining soil fertility. Rural population growth and displacement, due to urban expansion and the gazetting of parks and protected areas, have long encouraged the cultivation of new land by extending farming into forests, wetlands, hillsides, and pastures. However, in much of Africa the extensification path is rapidly becoming unsustainable or impractical as land grows more scarce in the face of population growth. That scarcity is increasing as the forest, rangeland, or wetland margin becomes exhausted, threatening biological diversity, and farmers are barred from using the remainder (for example, because of the gazetting of parks and protected areas), or soil degradation reduces crop yields and forage growth over time. Combined with increasing domestic demand for agricultural products fuelled by growth in population and incomes, there are strong pressures on farmers to intensify agriculture by using more labour and/or capital per hectare of land.

Farm Productivity in Burkina Faso: Effects of Animal Traction and Nonfarm Income

The purpose of this invited paper is to stimulate, at the micro, meso, and macro levels, debate on positive analytical approaches to agricultural productivity. The session focuses on Africa because it is the only developing region where crop output and yield growth is lagging seriously behind population growth. The present paper treats the micro (farmhousehold) level. Macro and meso analyses are useful for tracing productivity effects of policy and infrastructure change employing broad samples over long periods. Micro analyses tend to track smaller samples over shorter periods, but dig below the aggregate surface to discern and explain productivity differences over crops, zones, and farmer groups. Micro analysis is useful for policy and technology formulation and for infrastructure and commodity promotion strategies. Further, many aggregate studies are limited to only a few composite product categories because of lack of more detailed data on labor, land, and capital allocations over crops. To obtain finer distinctions among crops, one needs detailed farm management surveys. Since the spate of African farm management studies in the 1960s and 1970s, soils have rapidly degraded, access to land has become increasingly constrained, factor and credit markets have changed structurally, and nonfarm activity by farm households has apparently increased. These changes should affect productivity across farm types, suggesting the need to revive attention to farm-level analysis. Past farm-level productivity work in Africa, which largely used positive analysis, tended to stratify the sample exogenously based on farm characteristics, generally by farm size, use of animal traction, access to credit, use of new seed varieties, land tenure status, or income. We follow these earlier studies by stratifying the farm household data by a factor we expect to affect technical parameters, namely farm capital. In the Guinean zone of Burkina Faso in particular, we stratify according to whether the household owns animal traction equipment (foll wing Barrett et al., and Jaeger and Matlon). Besides adding to empirical evidence on the productivity effects of animal traction, we endogenously stratify the sample with a selectivity model, an approach too rarely taken (with a few recent exceptions such as Carter) in productivity research. We then estimate production functions, controlling for selectivity bias. Such an approach also allows us to test the (indirect) effect of nonfarm income on productivity through its effect on technology adoption as embodied in farm capital acquisition. Studies of nonfarm income effects on capital acquisition are not absent in the literature (e.g. Barrett et al. in eastern Burkina), but they have been somewhat neglected in farm-level work, and neglected even more in aggregate-level research because of the rarity of rural nonfarm income data.

Household food demand in Burkina Faso: Implications for food policy

Chronic food production deficits since the early 1970s have prompted policymakers of Burkina Faso to emphasize technological research with the goal of increasing the production of the mostconsumed locally-grown cereals: sorghum, millet and maize. Meanwhile, urban consumers have been developing preferences for rice and wheat, cereals that are primarily imported. This study estimates demand relationships among food items in Ouagadougou, Burkina. The results of the estimation suggest that prices, income, household composition, education, marital status and urbanization were jointly important in explaining household expenditure allocations. Both local and imported cereal consumption responded positively to an income increase. However, incremental income changes would lead to relatively greater consumption of locally produced cereals by lowincome households whereas high-income households would consume relatively more wheat and rice. The household model is then used to demonstrate its relevance in addressing food policy issues, by forecasting the levels of urban grain demand under alternative income and demographic scenarios. With increased production due to advances in technology, the urban demand levels do not exhaust the rural surplus of local cereals, but deficits persist in the rice-wheat sector. The results underscore the importance of technological research since Burkina could become self-sufficient in at least the production of sorghum, millet and maize.