Impact of adoption of agricultural extension services on farm households food security in Cameroon

Abstract

Improving farmers’ welfare has been the concern of the government and international donors in sub-Saharan Africa and particularly in Cameroon. Encouraging farmers to adopt agricultural extension services is one of the most important measures implemented to improve the rural farmers’ welfare situation. Thus, the main aim of our study is to assess the impact of the adoption of agricultural extension services on the welfare (food security) of smallholder rural farmers in the Centre region of Cameroon. Our study employs the endogenous switching regression model to account for both selection and endogeneity bias on survey data obtained from two divisions in the Centre region of Cameroon. Using Household Dietary Diversity Score (HDDS) as a measure of our food security access indicator, results suggest that adoption of agricultural extension services significantly reduces the HDDS of farmers’ households by 0.267 points at 5 percent significance level. This result demonstrates that adopting agricultural extension services doesn’t improve the diversity of nutritional intake by rural farm households thereby suggesting the benefits obtained from income does not always lead to the consumption of diverse nutritional food. Given that food security has no standard measurement, extension services adoption could, however, improve other aspects of food security.

Input credit scheme, farm productivity and food security nexus among smallholder rice farmers: evidence from North East Ghana

“…As access to credit increases, participants become more food secured because farmers tend to have financial capacity to improve their agricultural production and consequently their household dietary diversity (Ngomi et al ., 2020). Male farmers had their productivity significantly decreased and this could be attributed to the fact that male farmers usually divert their resources to food crops during the production season.…”

“…(2020) that reported a positive impact of participation in the UTZ-RA voluntary certification program on productivity. Ngomi et al . (2020) also reported a positive impact of participation in agricultural extension services programme on household dietary diversity score in Cameroon.…”

“…The results also reveal that food security declines with high levels of education of non-participants and could possibly be due to the fact that uneducated farmers are familiar with low-income jobs and generate less income which in turn decreases their ability to buy more food or consume more (Ngomi et al ., 2020). Further, both productivity and dietary diversity of participants increase with years of rice farming experience, and this suggests that as the years of experience increases, farmers acquire adequate knowledge of how to improve crop production (Ngomi et al ., 2020).…”

“…Additionally, large farm size has a positive impact on productivity and food security for participants and negative impact for non-participants. This means that farmland regarded as a wealth doubles production translating into food availability in the household (Ngomi et al ., 2020). Furthermore, being married especially for the non-participants significantly decreased their productivity.…”

Beyond money metrics

“…In Tanzania, researchers found that farmer field schools encouraged farmers to adopt technologies that helped smooth production over seasons (i.e., produced food across all seasons) and reduced hunger (Larsen and Bie Lilleør 2014). However, in Cameroon, an evaluation found that extension services did not improve the household dietary diversity score (Ngomi et al 2020).…”