(table 8). The percentage decline in mean urban incomes was slightly less than the decline in rural incomes, however. One might have expected the agriculture sector (and therefore the rural sector), as the most important producer of tradables, to have fared much worse than the urban sector, but that does not appear to have been the case.

Table 8 Urban and Rural Contribution to Poverty

|_(Poverty li_|_ne = 75, 000_|_CFAFper_|_year in 19_|_85 CFAF)_|||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
||_Contrib_<br>_ind_|_ution to hea_<br>_ex of pove_|_dcount_<br>_rty_|_Shar_|_e ofpopula_|_tion_|
||_1985_|_1988_|_1993_|_1985_|_1988_|_1993_|
|Urban|16.7|15.7|25.7|41.4|38.7|42.9|
|Rural|63.3|84.3|74.3|58.6|61.3|57.1|

It is also curious that export crop farmers fared somewhat better than food crop farmers, who are largely producers of nontradables (except for rice, the price of which was controlled by the government and allowed to decline in real terms prior to the devaluation). Within the rural areas, poverty increased much faster among food crop farmers than export crop farmers between 1988 and 1993. In 1988, export and food crop farmers had roughly the same incidence of poverty (Grootaert, 1996).'° By 1993 the incidence of poverty was some 10 percentage points higher among food crop farmers than among export crop farmers (table 9). This is somewhat surprising because there was a large decline in real export crop prices, particularly cocoa, which declined over 50 percent between 1988 and 1993 (table 10). In contrast, real staple food prices declined between 20 percent to 30 percent between 1988 and 1993 (table 11), not quite as much as real export crop producer prices. So all other things being equal, we would have expected food crop farmers to have been relatively more insulated from the recession than export crop farmers.

A partial explanation for the finding may be that the decline in producer prices had already been absorbed in the 1988 survey results. There is some evidence that farmgate cocoa and coffee producer prices were lower than official prices before the prices were officially lowered in 1989 (Azam, 1994). Food crop farmers may have also suffered disproportionately to the extent that they provided wage labor for export crop farmers, and wages or employment fell. There is, however, little information about the behavior of the rural labor market available.

The decline in real staple food prices merits some comment. Several factors may have been responsible. One factor is that as the real returns to cocoa, coffee and cotton production fell in the second half of the 1980s, farmers may have shifted some resources out of export crop production into the production of staple food crops, thus increasing the supply of staples and putting downward pressure on staple food prices. As the recession intensified and incomes fell, demand for staple foods fell as well (except perhaps for staples such as maize and cassava that are inferior goods). Finally, the decline in the real price of rice--due in part to government's pricing policy--also likely placed downward pressure on the real price of other staple food crops.

10 Unfortunately, the aggregate data file we obtained for the 1985-88 LSMS data does not include the socioeconomic group variable so we cannot reproduce Grootaert's results using the INS deflators. In 1988, the poverty incidence, using his deflators, was .210 for export crop farmers and .197 for food crop farmers, based on the 75,000 CFAF poverty line.

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