Farmers on the Central Plateau of Burkina Faso in West Africa cultivate under precarious conditions. Rainfall variability is extremely high in this area and accounts for much of the uncertainty surrounding the farmers' decision-making process. Strategies to cope with these risks are typically dynamic. Sequential decision making is one of the most important ways to cope with risk due to uncertain rainfall. In this paper, a stochastic programming model is presented to describe farmers' sequential decisions in reaction to rainfall. The model describes farmers' strategies of production, consumption, selling, purchasing, and storage from the start of the growing season until one year after the harvest period. This dynamic model better describes farmers' strategies than do static models that are usually applied. This study draws important policy conclusions regarding reorientation of research programs and illustrates how operations research techniques can be usefully applied to study grass root problems in developing countries.
Reductions in transport and transaction costs are expected to have a major effect on the functioning of food markets in developing countries. For Burkina Faso, this is a relevant issue as it may have important consequences for the food markets in urban and rural deficit areas. A partial equilibrium model is presented to analyze the short-term effects of reduced costs on price formation, inter-regional cereal trade, and farmers' and traders' storage strategies. Our results show that the high expectations with regard to the direct effects of cost reductions on food prices and food availability require some nuance. The effects of a reduction of transport costs will be small. Moreover, also the unintended negative consequences on the competitive position of farmers and traders in other regions that do not profit from roadconstruction should be taken into account. Finally, it is concluded that only if transport and transaction costs are reduced simultaneously, will both the consumers and farmers benefit significantly. 0 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. JEL classijcation: L 1 1 ; 0 18; R4 1
Agricultural production in the NW Burkina Faso is seriously endangered by soil erosion and an overall decline in soil fertility. In the past 15 years various anti-erosion methods have been adopted in this region with some success. The widespread promotion of rock bunds is an important example. Land conservation methods alone without increased efforts to maintain (or to increase) soil fertility levels does not suffice in the long run. The potential impact of a combination of rock bunds and zai, a local technology to improve water infiltration and efficiency of manure application, was investigated. The analysis is carried out at farm level with a stochastic linear programming model. It includes sequential decision making to cope with rainfall risks. The study shows the important potential of rock bunds and application of zai, and limitations due to labour and manure constraints. The techniques are largely applied on common fields. Changes in labour organization and use of manure have to be introduced before women may profit from these techniques on their individual fields. The results show that the impact on farm-level food security is more limited than is sometimes supposed on the basis of a simple extrapolation of plot-level results.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.