Abstract

A deteriorating physical environment, disturbances in the international economy and inappropriate domestic policies have all contributed to a decline of agriculture in the Ivory Coast. Through this project, a research program will be launched to discover solutions to the country's agricultural problems and training will be initiated to develop research capacity in rural economics. The research program will involve the establishment of permanent research bases in two areas of the country, and include both social scientists from the Centre ivoirien de recherches économiques et sociales (CIRES) and biological scientists from national agricultural research programs.

Post-Project Summary

An observation base was established in the town of Korhogo, 600 km north of Abidjan, and a second one at Abengourou. The Korhogo base reached some of the project objectives, but work at Abengourou never got off the ground, for oganizational, structural and logistical reasons. These are analysed from the point of view of the coordinator and the researchers in the final report. In the case of three out of four sub-projects, the data collected are available and can be manipulated. The data from the fourth sub-project are incomplete. Three theses were written on the data collected at the Korhogo base in 1987-1988: Konan, N. N. (1990) L'économie du coton dans les systèmes de production agricole du nord de la Côte d'Ivoire et son incidence sur les cultures vivrières; Pokou, K. (1990) Interventions publiques et transformation des systèmes de production agricole dans la région de Korhogo; Binde, A. C. (1992) Le riz irrigué dans les systèmes de production de la zone de Korhogo. Six scientific articles were also written based on the same data, and were published in the CIRES journals. A fourth thesis was written using the project methodology. Besides doctoral theses, the Korhogo base contributed to the training of one researcher at the Institut des Savanes (IDESSA) at Bouaké, along with two agricultural technicians.

Recipient Institution(s)