Rwanda remains trading very low volume of beans inside the country and across borders thereby becoming unable to meet national and international demands. This is exacerbated by low market participation of bean growers. This study assessed factors that influence market participation and extent of participation among bean growers in Nyanza district. Probit model was used to analyze the factors influencing market participation among bean growers while the extent of market participation was analyzed using Tobit model. The probit results indicated that factors that positively and significantly influenced the probability of farmers to participate in output market were bean quantity produced, market experience, and access to credit while factors that negatively and significantly influenced market participation decisions included distance to nearest market, age and access to off-farm activities. Tobit results revealed that factors that were found to have positive statistical significant impact on the extent of market participation were bean quantity produced, marketing experience and selling price. Contrary to earlier expectation, land size was found to have negative significant impact on the quantity of bean marketed. This is possibly an indication that the increased household's participation in output market is a function of farm productivity too.

Aims: Snap bean (Phaseolus vulgaris L.) productivity is low in Rwanda. Investigations were carried out to assess the productivity of Snap bean using pot experiments. Methodology: The experiment was laid out in a completely randomized design with seven (7) treatments: Compost (T0), Cow manure (T1), Sheep manure (T2), Compost with diammonium phosphate (DAP), DAP alone (T3), Cow manure with DAP (T4), Sheep manure with DAP (T5) and control (T6) on Andisol and Oxisol replicated three (3) times. Results: The results showed that the pod yield was the highest in Andisol (2.39 tha-1) and the application of sheep manure significantly (P<.001) increased the leaf area, the number of leaves (P = .01) and the plant height (P= .

Rwanda is a landlocked country of Eastern Africa with 26,338 km 2. The total arable land in Rwanda is more or less than 1.8 million ha and Rwanda has the highest population density in Africa. A series of policy reforms and agrarian strategic plan have been elaborated to transform the economy now oriented towards subsistence agriculture into a knowledge-based service and market-oriented economy. The research question is who has the right to land ownership for its rational use? The purpose of this article is to contribute to land sharing prospects between agricultural operators and investors in Rwanda for the optimisation of land access in the rural areas. This work is the result of deep literature review related to the situation of land issue prevailing from pre-colonial period to the recent 2004 land policy reforms in Rwanda. Crucial challenges before the beginning of the effective agrarian evolution are widely discussed. Agrarian perspectives show that the foreignization of agrarian reforms put Rwandan peasants in uncomfortable position. The changes in land use and tenure in Rwanda have been stimulated by both outside influence and inside adversary forces. The real land reform policy consists in specialization and exploitation of large-scale farms subsequent to land consolidation of small plots registered by individuals whose property certificates are preserved. Meanwhile, the required registration of land holdings does not entitle the land to definitive appropriation but it only provides the rights of use if rational exploitation is guaranteed. Such a rational system may result in expropriation for the inefficient producers.This article emphasize that in the case of Rwanda were population growth rate is high, the redistribution of land has its limits. The land consolidation should not be a rule either. Any agrarian reform must find a point of balance. This equilibrium consists in reducing the pressure on the property assets and promoting rural entrepreneurship. Agriculture program may improve and diversify the mode of land access and improved input acquisition to feed a growing population whereas non-agriculture population is gradually increasing. It has been found that farmers operating in cooperatives are more secure and have advantage for land access than individual farmers.

Rwanda’s Land Policy Reform promotes agri-business and encourages self-employment. This paper aims to analyze the situation from a self-employment perspective when dealing with expropriation risk in rural areas. In this study, we conducted a structured survey addressed to 63 domestic units, complemented by focus groups of 47 participants from Kimonyi Sector. The binary logistic regression analysis revealed that having job alternatives, men heading domestic units, literacy skills in English, and owning land lease certificates (p < 0.05) are positively and significantly related to awareness of land expropriation risk. The decision of the head of the domestic unit to practice the main activity under self-employment status is positively influenced by owning a land lease certificate, number of plots, and French skills, while skills in English and a domestic unit’s size have a positive and significant influence on involvement in a second activity as self-employed. Information on expropriation risk has no significant effect on self-employment. The domestic unit survey revealed that 34.9% of the heads of domestic units only have one job, 47.6% have at least two jobs in their everyday life, 12.7% have a minimum of three jobs, and 4.8% are inactive. The focus group synthesis exposed the limits to self-employment ability and facilities.

SUMMARYThis paper investigated the impact of regional integration on the agricultural trade development. Using a literature review, the study showed that the results of common agricultural initiatives aiming at agriculture sector and agricultural trade development have not been convincing due to lack of appropriate mechanisms and institutional actions to operationalize regional agricultural policy and strategy at the national level. The paper also revealed that Rwanda benefited from its accession to EAC, especially in terms of the ease of access to regional markets through the establishment of the Common Market, the Customs Union and the alleviation of some of regional trade barriers for basic foodstuffs and consumer goods. This led to an increased value of its agricultural products exports to neighboring countries. The analysis of the Net Export Index and the Grubel-Lloyd measure for maize, potato and bean revealed that Rwanda is a net importer of maize and a net exporter of potato and bean. For these two staple foods, the results revealed that if Rwanda manages, through policy and institutional actions, to remove or alleviate the bottlenecks that prevent farmers from producing enough for export, it can have a competitive advantage on neighboring countries' markets whose access has been facilitated by its accession to the EAC.