Factors enhancing agricultural productivity under innovation technology: Insights from Cameroon

Abstract

This paper analyzes the impact of innovation adoption, namely, improved seeds or modern equipment and examines the effects of farmer education, access to credit, and land tenure security on agricultural productivity in Cameroon. We take advantage of a nationally representative survey to analyze factors affecting the probability of adopting innovation and their effects on productivity. We use the Heckman procedure to address potential selection bias. The results reveal significant productivity-enhancing effects of these key factors. They enhance agricultural productivity following innovation adoption and typically promote adoption itself. The propensity to adopt innovation and the potential gain in productivity increase with education level. Credit permits farmers to adopt the innovation and to purchase high-efficiency pesticides and fertilizers. Therefore, agricultural production increases in a timely and appropriate manner. Conditional on adopting innovation, tertiary education will produce a 16.5% to 18.3% increase in yield in value per ha, while access to credit leads a 10.9% to 15.5% gains. Our findings contribute to a better understanding of factors enhancing agricultural productivity under innovation technology and have important policy implications. The adoption of improved varieties or modern equipment alone is not sufficient to boost crop yield. Other productivity-enhancing factors should be promoted to exploit their full yield potential.

Keywords:

• adoption of innovation
• agricultural productivity
• improved seeds
• modern farm equipment

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Note that the rubber does not use seeds but matrices. However, for simplicity we include them in improved seeds.

2 Since a farmer can borrow more money against a larger farm than a smaller farm, all other things being equal; since farmland owner could use landholdings as collateral, farmers who hold a title to the land they use have more credit than those who do not; since more educated farmers are better informed about credit market and can negotiate better loans.

3 The estimated coefficients in the outcome models are estimate margins at the means of covariates. To interpret them in terms of percentage change, we divided the marginal effects by the conditional average of productivity, which is 213,981CFA per ha for improved seeds and 195,304CFA per ha for adoption of at least one innovation, improved seed or modern equipment.