The Determinants of Marketing Efficiency of Cocoa Farmer Organization in Cameroon

Abstract

Access to the market for smallholder is a permanent concern of actors of development in developing country. Many studies carried out arrived at conclusions according to which the smallholder still badly connected to the agricultural market (Key et al., 2000;Gabre-Madhin, 2001;Gabre-Madhin, 2009). One of the solutions is to improve the access of those smallholder to the market is the collective marketing of their product through the farmer's organizations (FOs). These FOs being regarded as small commercial firms, the question of their efficiency remains a permanent concern for the farmers who do always participate to this form of marketing. This article thus aims of measuring the differences in efficiency between the forms of FOs and identifying the determinants of these differences in efficiency. The estimation of efficiency levels is made by the DEA model and the identification of the determinants of these efficiency levels is made by the model of negative binomial regression. Globally, the results show that FOs commercial efficiency is still low. This level is estimated at 0.57. Besides, efficiency is significantly affected by FO's internal factors (FOs' age, number of years spent in the position by the FOs' administrative staff, governance level of FOs, education level of FOs' leaders and leaders' productive capacity) and external factor (area removal). In particular, the results indicate on the one hand that the age at which FO is mature for marketing efficiency is 32 months. This age which seems to be rather long may be due to the fragility of most of FOs. On the other hand, the estimation indicates that the weight of productive leaders encouraged them to meet the objectives of farmers.

The Nexus Between Cocoa Farmers’ Business Schools Participation and Impact to Support Livelihood Improvement Strategies in Ghana

“…Consequently, there was the need for FFS to supplement extension service delivery in the country. Nevertheless, after successfully implementing the FFS, it was later realized to be more production and pest management centered (Kamdem, 2016). As such, farmers’ marketing and business skills were deficient, thereby making farmers unable to realize the full benefits of the initiative.…”

“…In Malawi, Chilemba and Ragasa (2020) used the difference-in-difference approach and the propensity score matching (PSM) technique to determine the impact of FBS on smallholder farmers in Malawi. In Cameroon, Kamdem (2016) employed the PSM coupled with the Rosenbaum Bounds Sensitivity Analysis approach to estimate the impact of FBS on cocoa yield in Cameroon.…”

Socio-economic and institutional factors underlying efficiency of smallholder vegetable farms in Southwest region of Cameroon

“…Policy makers have focused their attention on instilling adoption of new technologies to increase farm productivity, while vegetable farm productivity could be improved trough an efficient use of existing resources or by taking advantage of scale economies. Particularly, in Cameroon, few studies have been conducted on technical efficiency of field crops (Kamdem, 2012; Nchare, 2007). Elsewhere in Sub-Sahara in Africa, a number of studies on technical efficiency have been conducted and highlighted factors that influence technical efficiency particularly for major food and export crops.…”

Role of Local Context in the Success of Farmer Collectives: A Review

“…The higher collective could facilitate FC to access market for procuring intangible and tangible inputs and selling FC outputs. The facilitation could either be direct (Kamdem, 2012) or indirect by playing the advocacy and lobbying role to influence market and national policies (Tolno et al, 2015; Ton, de Grip, Lançon, Onumah, & Proctor, 2014).…”

“…Various environmental factors such as geospatial location and natural resources were reported for their role in FC functioning and performance (Becchetti, Conzo, & Gianfreda, 2012). In the context of geospatial location, the studies related to market access have studied the role of distance between FC and market and road quality in FC efficiency and performance (Barham & Chitemi, 2009; Kamdem, 2012; Ragasa & Golan, 2014). Commonly, land as a natural resource is considered in literature to study its role in FC.…”