Increasing Cotton Farmers Incomes in Mali West Africa: Eliminate Subsidies in Developed Countries or Productivity Increase in Mali?

Felix G. Baquedano and John H. Sanders

No 6426, 2008 Annual Meeting, July 27-29, 2008, Orlando, Florida from American Agricultural Economics Association (New Name 2008: Agricultural and Applied Economics Association)

Abstract: In a WTO battle and the press the argument is often made that eliminating US cotton subsidies would have a large effect on the incomes and competitive position of farmers in developing countries. In Francophone West African cotton production productivity has stagnated after rapid gains in the first two decades after independence (1960-1980). Constructing a farm model based upon farmers’ definition of their decision making framework we compare the effects of the elimination of US subsidies with various productivity increasing measures for cotton and diversification in Mali. In the farm model we take into account the elasticity of transmission of a change in the world cotton price to the farm gate price. The gains to eliminating US subsides are very small unless the transmission elasticities of world cotton price to the farm gate price are substantially increased. In contrast the various technological alternatives including Bt cotton introduction, the use of higher and more regionally defined fertilization levels for cotton, and the introduction of a new technology and marketing package for sorghum all have substantially higher returns for the cotton farmers in the West African site of Dioila, Mali. Even with substantial improvement in the mechanisms enabling farmers to benefit from the higher prices of the elimination of US subsidies, there are still much higher returns to the various types of productivity increases. Maybe West Africa needs to act more now on increasing their productivity as protracted trade negotiations continue.

Keywords: Agricultural and Food Policy; Crop Production/Industries; Productivity Analysis (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 46
Date: 2008
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-afr, nep-agr and nep-eff
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://ageconsearch.umn.edu/record/6426/files/469542a.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ags:aaea08:6426

DOI: 10.22004/ag.econ.6426

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in 2008 Annual Meeting, July 27-29, 2008, Orlando, Florida from American Agricultural Economics Association (New Name 2008: Agricultural and Applied Economics Association) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by AgEcon Search ().