Technological change, land use patterns and household income distribution in the Sahel: The Burkina Faso case

Sunder Ramaswamy, Purdue University

Abstract

The dissertation is organized into two parts. The first part is concerned with a farming household's choice of agricultural technologies especially its responses to the twin forces of increasing population pressure on land and improved market access. Ester Boserup's contra-Malthusian hypothesis that population pressure on land induces technological change is examined with a representative farm programming model for the Central Plateau of Burkina Faso. When there is no pressure, and land is abundant, farmers prefer to cultivate the lighter soils. These soils are easier to cultivate but not very fertile. The push to cultivating the heavier and more fertile soils comes about in the Sahel as a result of population pressure and improved market access. The programming model results are then compared with recent field observation regarding technological adoption on the Central Plateau in the face of these outside pressures. In the second part, the dissertation focuses on the impact of new agricultural technologies on the intra-household distribution of income. A similar whole-farm programming model is set up for the prosperous Solenzo region of Burkina Faso. The conventional wisdom in the literature on Women in development is that new agricultural technologies increasingly marginalize women from the development process. In the Sahelian farming households where land holdings are differentiated into the better quality collective lands and the small, less fertile private plots, the new agricultural technologies are principally adopted on the collective fields. With the introduction of the labor demanding technologies, the household head mobilizes the increased factors of production from either within the household or from outside factor markets. If increased labor is mobilized from within the household, it implies that the various members of the family, especially the women are spending less time on their private plots. Since the profits accruing from the private plots go to the individual members while the distribution of profits realized from the collective land holdings are decided by the household head, the reduced participation by the women on their private plots apparently reflects an increasing marginalization of the women. A bargaining model is thus set up to evaluate whether the introduction of highly profitable agricultural technologies could make the farm household and the women better off. The model predictions are then compared with recent field studies for the region.

Degree

Ph.D.

Advisors

Sanders, Purdue University.

Subject Area

Agricultural economics|Economics

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