Migration and agricultural intensification at origin: evidence from farm households in Central Africa

Abstract

Migration and remittances has potential to improve development in rural areas but in Rwanda and Eastern Democratic Republic of Congo empirical work is still limited. We used New Economics of Labour Migration as analytical framework to explain the role of migration and remittances on crop intensification. A randomly selected sample of 480 farm households were interviewed. We found that out-migration negatively influence input use while remittance does not affect their use either. We recommend smart input subsidies and policy on their distribution to create higher incomes, thus discouraging massive rural out-migration. In addition, creation of an enabling investment environment in the sending areas by improving basic infrastructure and efficiently channelling extension messages to farmers would increase intensification and crop yields.

Keywords:

• rural out-migration
• improved varieties
• remittances
• fertilizers
• Central Africa

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank particularly the individual farmers who participated in the field survey interviews in Rwanda and the DRC.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Mandate area is political units, which are relatively large and corresponds to set of Districts in Rwanda and Territories in the DRC. The number of people living in each mandate area can vary between 300,000 and 1,200,000. Action Sites correspond to different administrative units in each of the countries (‘Secteurs’ in Rwanda, and ‘Localités’ in North and South-Kivu).

2. We used Tobexog command available in STATA 12 to run Smith and Blundell tests.

3. The IV tobit results were obtained by cmp command in STATA as proposed by Roodman (2011) because ivtobit command is appropriate if the endogenous variable is continuous but in this study migration is categorical.

4. Smart subsidy is one that target households meeting certain criteria (e.g. poor) and hence is more cost-effective in meeting their objectives than the universal (untargeted) subsidies used in the past.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the International Center for Development and Decent work (ICDD), Germany and International Institute of Tropical agriculture (IITA), Uganda.