This article deals with the control of land resources through ownership, access and acquisition of agricultural land in the Tahoua region of Niger. It explains how male and female heads of household access and acquire agricultural land. It also looks at the availability of cropland and the size of farmland in rural areas. An analysis of 84 sample heads of household, 42 of them male and 42 female, showed that inheritance remains the dominant mode of acquisition, with 52% of households acquiring land. This is followed by purchase coupled with inheritance (19%) and rental (7%). Female heads of household rent (12% renters vs. 2.40% renters of agricultural land) and lend (4.80% vs. 2.40% of men). The analysis shows that the farmland available to households consists of fields and gardens. Male and female households have plots of varying sizes, up to 15 hectares for fields and 3 hectares for gardens. On average, female households have only 2 hectares of land, compared with around 6 hectares for male households. A comparison of average field sizes, using ANOVA analysis with Tukey’s test, shows that the average areas owned by heads of households in different zones are not significantly different. The average is 4.39 ha in agricultural zones versus 3.07 ha in agro-pastoral zones.
It’s in a context of climate change and health that this research aims to identify the determinants of the economic performance of farms in the rural municipality of Kourthèye (Niger) on a sample of 250 producers. By adopting a parametric approach, the levels of economic efficiency were estimated and decomposed into allocative and technical efficiency from a stochastic production frontier (Cobb-Douglas-type); and the correlation test to study the link between economic performance indicators and those of health. The farm was broken down into irrigated and dry crops. Empirical results show that there’s an efficiency differential between them. For irrigated crops, the average allocative efficiency indices are 0.35 and 0.26 for dry crops. With regard to the economic efficiency, it’s 0.17 and 0.10 respectively, reflecting the weak economic performance of farms. The examination of the economic performance determinants shows that Household size, Off-farm income, Experience in agriculture, Access to informal credit, training of farmers, and Climate information play a positive and significant role in achieving of production frontier. However, all the health indicators taken into account have a negative and significant effect at 1% on the economic performance of these farms. Thus, a policy of the state, donors and NGOs, improving health status, other significant determinants, adoption of new modern technologies could certainly improve the overall level of economic performance of farms.
In sahelian contries like Niger, the market garden is a sustainable response to improve agriculture yet dominated by dry crops. This work is produced to analyze the technical efficacity and to identify socioeconomics and technical factors which explain this techncal efficacity. The approach used is the Stochastic Fronter Analysis and Cobb-Douglass is applicated as function of production. In order to identify the determiants of this efficacity, the Fractionnal Regression Model is used. It results that the efficacity scores averages are 44,51% for tomato, 51,81% for piment and 64,09% for cabbage. Between the farmer who is near the fronter and the farmer who is fare the fronter, we have a high contrast. The results show that being alphabete, access to vulgarisation, the farmer’s object and being near of exploitation improve the technical efficacity. However, selling in the exploitation, being in farmers’organisation and the contractualization with traders reduce the technical efficacity. This paper purpose to government and their partners to include rainy market gaderning in agricultural policy.
Market gardening is emerging as a credible alternative for crop diversification. The objective of this article is to characterize the market gardening practiced at in rainy season. The methodology adopted consisted to question the farmers and to prospect of vegetable production basins. The sampling concerned 102 farmers who represent more than 20% of the target population. The data collected was includ to descriptive and analytical analyzes. The result shows that fruit-vegetables are the main crops grown. The pure cultivation of cabbage, peppers or tomatoes, is by far the most favored by farm managers. The main irrigation system used by rainy market gardeners is made up of boreholes (86% of market gardeners), motor pumps (93.14%) and pipes (69.65%). The analysis of cultural practices reveals a strong application of maintenance manure (85.29%) and phytosanitary chemicals (95.09%). In addition, the factorial analysis of the mixed data reveals four groups of wintering market gardening operations with a total variance explained at 67.36%. The first group is made up of intensive and specialized market gardening operations with an internal variance rate of 31.07%. The second group is represented by diversified vegetable farms favoring the practice of associated crops with an internal variance of 29.74%. The third group says socio-organized farms (22.75% of the internal variance), favoring crop rotation. The fourth type is called the group of extensive farms.