Throughout Africa, per capita food production has been declining since the early 1960s. Cameroon has sought to counter this trend by increasing agricultural productivity through research and extension. In order to establish future investment priorities, policy makers need to know if past agricultural research investments have earned sufficient returns to justify continued funding. Further, national experiences need to be compared to see if returns varied across programs, and in cases where they did, explanations need to be sought to discover why these variations exist. To address these issues, data were collected in Cameroon and analyzed in order to estimate the benefits and costs of investments in sorghum and cowpea research and extension in northern Cameroon. Specific data that were needed to construct benefit and cost streams included the following: yields of traditional and introduced technologies, area harvested, adoption rates of technological innovations, prices of both inputs and outputs, climatic factors influencing both the research agenda and the returns to this research, and the costs of research and extension efforts. Focussing on the period 1979-87, the analysis addressed three questions: What were the returns to past investments? What factors explained the estimated returns and any variability in returns between the sorghum and cowpea programs? And how did institutions influence these returns and the distribution of their benefits?
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
Publisher Info
Paper provided by Michigan State University, Department of Agricultural, Food, and Resource Economics in its series Food Security III Papers with number
11316.
References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
Cited by: (explanations, Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.)