Maître-Assistant, Département de Géographie et Aménagement du Territoire (DGAT), Faculté des Lettres, Arts et Sciences Humaines (FLASH), Université de Parakou (UP), Benin
Regularly practiced in the off-season, the gardening market not only contributes to the reduction of food insecurity and poverty but also presents itself as one of the main production sectors, creating jobs in rural and urban areas. The purpose of this article is to analyze the socio-economic effects of the gardening market activities in the municipality of Athiéme with a view to contributing to the poverty reduction rate and increasing the income of farmers. To this end, a workforce of 115 market gardeners in a group or association spread over five (5) districts was prioritized during the survey. Some parameters of the descriptive statistics combined with the calculation of the net margin of vegetable production made it possible to process the data collected. The results show that, from 2008 to 2015, the market garden production parameters (areas and production) experienced a spectacular change, respectively from 365 to 830 ha and 587 tonnes to 5,180 tonnes. Leafy vegetables are the most profitable with a net operating cost of 1,105,000 F CFA while, chili is the least profitable speculation with 181,000 F CFA. In Athiémé, all market gardeners use their income to stock up on food crops, while 95% of them invest in health, compared to 17% of them who use them as buildings. However, although the gardening market has a high economic performance, it is important to identify ways of improvement that could lead to the taking of measures by the public authorities, aimed at a global and sustainable development of market gardening in its socioeconomic dimensions.
Agriculture is the base of the economic growth of Benin. So the improvement of the outputs became a permanent concern of all the actors of the agricultural sector. Present research aims at studying the contribution of the installation of the underworld to the productivity of rice in the Commune of Boukoumbé. The adopted methodological approach is articulated around the document retrieval, the investigations of ground, the processing the data and the analysis of the results. The use of the Active Method of Participative Research (MARP) made it possible to collect information near the targeted made up actors of 50 producers, 20 persons in charge of groupings and 05 agents of rural framing. It arises from the study that the Commune of Boukoumbé has 67 underworld with a total surface area of 2106 ha whose 12 sites are arranged corresponding to a surface of 320 ha. The average outputs obtained for the two varieties are approximately 2.9380 t/ha on the level of the arranged underworld and 1.3073 t/ha for the non made-up underworld. The installation of the underworld thus represents a strategic axis for the increase in the especially rice agricultural productivity in the sector of study.
The study presents land owning constraints which Parakou urban market gardeners are confronted to, and which affect negatively the development of their activity. The methodological approach used here is based on a census of the city market gardening production sites, on an evaluation of the farmed land area, and on exchanges with actors concerned with that activity, in order to apprehend the land owning difficulties and their impact on the activity. A data base has been constituted after analysis of the inquiry files through the SPSS software, 17.0 version. Then, descriptive statistics tools have been used for the analysis of the data. The obtained results have indicated that the legacy donation and the purchase cover 53 % of the means of access to land, the anarchical occupation is 21 % and the loan guarding and small farm by share cropper cover 26 %. None of the census of the market gardening sites offers sustainable investment guarantee for the market gardeners because they possess no secured property title. As such, the producers could be sent away from the lands at any time, from one season to the other, without any warning. That activity, which takes place essentially in the swampy underworld, at the base of slopes, and in the slope basins of the city, is characterized by farming on small land portions by producers (between 365 m