Determinants of farmers ’ adoption of improved cassava and sweetpotato varieties in Sierra Leone

The capacity of most African countries to produce enough food for their people is declining in the face of a rapidly increasing population and civil conflicts leading to dependence on food imports and food aid. Adoption and sustenance of farm technologies that can help enhance food production remain a major challenge for research and development agencies in many African countries. Over the years, the Institute of Agricultural Research (IAR) has made substantial efforts in improving the productivity of small-scale farmers in Sierra Leone through the development of improved technologies. This paper is based on a survey of 280 farmers in six operational zones of IAR in Sierra Leone. The results show that improved cassava and sweetpotato varieties developed by the institute have been adopted not only by farmers who have collaborated with IAR in developing and testing these technologies, but by other farmers too. The results however indicate that among other constraints, the adoption of the improved varieties is inhibited considerably by limited finance and lack of high yielding and diseasefree planting materials acceptable by both the producers and consumers. The findings further suggest that farmers’ religion, marital status, sex, income sources outside agriculture and collaboration in on-farm research are important in influencing adoption and should therefore be taken into consideration by research and development agencies in the promotion of root and tubers crops in Sierra Leone. Introduction The capacity of most African countries to produce enough food for their people is declining in the face of a rapidly increasing population and civil conflicts leading to dependence on food imports and food aid. Adoption and sustenance of farm technologies that can help enhance food production remains a major challenge for research and development agencies in many African countries (Chitere and Kiros, 1996). The goal of agricultural research centres is to generate technologies for improving productivity, farmers’ welfare, and household nutritional status (Sangiga et al., 1999). In Sierra, like in most African countries, agriculture is of vital importance to the livelihood of millions of people as a source of food, employment and foreign exchange. The ten years war in Sierra Leone has aggravated the food situation problem as a large number of farm families were forced to flee bringing their agricultural activities to a halt. Even before the war, agricultural production was declining. Although the war is over, food production has not regained pre war levels. The country depends a lot on imported food (especially for the staple food rice) and on food aid (FAO, 200). Over the years, the Institute of Agricultural Research (IAR) has made substantial efforts in improving the productivity of small-scale farmers who make up the bulk of food producers in Sierra Leone, through the development of improved Proceedings of the 13th ISTRC Symposium, Arusha, Tanzania, 2007 594 technologies which involve the introduction of high yielding plant materials that are resistant to pests and diseases, and the use of improved agronomic and management practices. IAR has the mandate to conduct research on the improvement of cassava, sweetpotato, yams, maize, groundnut, cowpea, and soybean. However, the ultimate usefulness of these technologies is determined by their adoption by their adoption levels by the small scale farmers (Inaizumi et al., 1999). The adoption of a new agricultural technology is important for evaluating the impact of agricultural research investments, guiding technology development to satisfy the needs of clients, and also helps bring out potential impact at the farm household level (Sanginga, 1988, Inaizumi et al., 1999). It is therefore important to assess the technological packages to find out if they meet the farmers’ objectives. This will contribute immensely to technology transfer and facilitate the task of addressing the objectives of food security, malnutrition and poverty alleviation. The objective of this paper is to assess the determinants of farmers’ adoption of improved varieties of cassava and sweetpotato. In particular, the paper examines the rates of adoption of these varieties, the constraints that limit the adoption and the factors determining adoption . The basic hypothesis formulated for this study is that the socioeconomic characteristics of farmers are important in explaining their adoption behaviour. Materials and methods The survey was conducted in six operational zones of IAR. These include: Njala, and Bo in the Southern Province, Kenema in the Eastern Province and Rokupr, Makeni and Kabala in the Northern Province. The zones are representative of the ecological and traditional diversity in Sierra Leone. Twenty five IAR contact farmers and 25 non IAR contact farmers were then randomly selected per zone and involved in the study. Questionnaires were then administered to the farmers to collect information on their socio economic and demographic characteristic, rate of adoption of improved IAR cassava and sweetpotato varieties, effect of socio economic and demographic characteristic of farmers on adoption, production constraints, etc. Data were analysed using descriptive statistics such as averages and percentages as well as a logistic regression analysis to examine the effect of the socio –economic characteristics of farmers on the rate of adoption of IAR technologies. Results and discussions Socio economic characteristics of sampled farmers. Twenty farmers never returned the questionnaires. So the analysis is based on 280 farmers. Table 1 presents a summary of selected socio-economic characteristics of farmers interviewed. This table reveals that contact farmers had a mean household size of 9.5persons compared to 7.9persons for noncontact farmers. The higher family size for contact farmers is an indication of the potential labour force as well as the number of people to be fed. The mean age in the case of contact farmers was 43. 2 years and 43.0 years in the case of non contact farmers, indicating that the respondents are in the active producer age group and could contribute greatly to productive work on the farm. There were more women among noncontact farmers (29.3%) as compared to contact farmers (15.78%), which might be due to the fact that the number of female IAR contact farmers is low when compared to their male counterparts, a situation which IAR is trying to correct by deliberately targeting women as contact farmers. On the whole, the number of women farmers was very low (22.5%) compared to male farmers (77.5%). Majority of the farmers were married (95.7% of contact farmers and 90% of non contact farmers). This might not be surprising since marital status tends to influence the potential