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Investing in soils: field bunds and microcatchments in Burkina Faso

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 July 2002

Harounan Kazianga  and
William A. Masters
Harounan Kazianga
Affiliation:
Department of Agricultural Economics, Purdue University, 1145 Krannert Building, West Lafayette, IN 47907. Tel: 765 494 4235. Fax: 765 494 9176. Email: [email protected]; www.agecon.purdue.edu/staff/masters
William A. Masters
Affiliation:
Department of Agricultural Economics, Purdue University, 1145 Krannert Building, West Lafayette, IN 47907. Tel: 765 494 4235. Fax: 765 494 9176. Email: [email protected]; www.agecon.purdue.edu/staff/masters
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Abstract

This research uses field-level data from Burkina Faso to ask what determines farmers' investment in two well-known soil and water conservation techniques: field bunds (barriers to soil and water runoff), and microcatchments (small holes in which seeds and fertilizers are placed). Survey data for 1993 and 1994 are used to estimate Tobit functions, compute elasticities of adoption and intensity of use, perform robustness tests and estimate alternative models. Controlling for land and labor abundance and other factors we find that those who have more ownership rights over farmland, and who do more controlled feeding of livestock, tend to invest more in both technologies. The result suggests that responding to land scarcity with clearer property rights over cropland and pasture could help promote investment in soil conservation, and raise the productivity of factors applied to land.

Keywords

crop-livestock intensificationnatural resource managementproperty rights
Type
Policy Options
Information
Environment and Development Economics , Volume 7 , Issue 3 , July 2002 , pp. 571 - 591
Copyright
© 2002 Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

The data used in this study were collected by a project funded by the Canadian Agency for International Development and conducted by the University of Ouagadougou (Burkina Faso) and Laval University (Quebec, Canada). The authors thank Taladidia Thiombiano and Frederic Martin for making the data available, and Gerald Shively, Jess Lowenberg-DeBoer, and three referees for very helpful comments.