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Analyse du risque lié à l’adoption de systèmes intensifs de production : le cas des camellones chontales

1994; Université des Réseaux d'Expression Française; Volume: 3; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

1777-5949

J. Degand, François Vandercam, Olivier Pierard, M. Installé,

Agriculture and Rural Development Research

The Chontale Indians live in the swampy zones of Tabasco State in south-east Mexico. In 1979, ridges, known locally as « camellones », were built into a river bed to reclaim land permanently flooded by the construction of hydro-electric dams upstream. Extension agencies tried to develop a farming system involving intensive horticultural and livestock farming and improved management (use of fertilisers, improved varieties and mechanised tillage) on top of the traditional food crops to allow a family to live on a 0.4-ha plot of land. However, very few farmers adopted the innovations : most of them preferred to keep their old methods and carry on working part of the year as day labourers on sugar cane plantations. In the first part of the study, the results of two improved production systems are compared to those of traditional farming. The first used the same crops as the traditional but under improved management ; the second included fruit and vegetables in addition to the traditional food crops. (Livestock was not considered in this analysis.) Improved management, which generated a higher yield but also a higher cost of input, did not increase the profitability of traditional food crops. On the other hand, adding fruit and vegetables did result in significantly higher productivity of both land and labour. Consequently, since most farmers want to grow the maize, beans and cassava they use for home consumption themselves, improved management which reduces the space devoted to it and makes more land available for horticultural crops - is still to be recommended. In the second part of the study, we assess the risk associated with the proposed techniques and crops. In the event of crop failure, innovation would seem to lead to poor results. A critical frequency is calculated for extreme cases (such as total crop failure) as the failure frequency which cancels out the weighted mean of the benefits of total success and the disadvantage of failure. For most innovations, the calculated values of the critical frequency are significantly higher than that commonly accepted for actual failure probabilities. This implies the innovations should still be recommended. The authors suggest the poor adoption rate of the innovations lay in the fact that, notwithstanding cultural reasons, the Chontale Indians are far more sensitive to the negative consequences of innovation in the event of failure, even though it is not only unlikely but greatly offset by the higher returns in good years. Unfortunately, their defensive attitude prevents them from accumulating the capital which would free them from their precarious situation.