Rural development of tilapia culture in Africa : from myth to reality
Aquaculture development initiatives have often emphasized the need for African farmers to integrate this activity in their farming system. Aquaculture (as can be observed in Southeast Asia) should have evolved alongside ongoing development processes, and even become the catalyst of a reorientation of agriculture (from shifting to fixed). The objective of this article is to contribute to the development of this dynamic in Africa. This objective has practically never been achieved and some of the reasons for this failure are obvious: farmers were considered incapable to innovate and irrational in their choice of economic strategies. Moreover, the socioeconomic constraints of the farmers were totally unknown, and the internal economic systems of the rural development projects masked the need to propose a production unit really accessible to them. Aquaculture development remains a current concern. Social sciences use many tools to understand farmers' strategies. Here, farmers are considered as economic agents whose rationality is explained essentially by their socioeconomic environment and the environment that they develop. The relevance of this analysis is tested against a concrete case: the forested areas of Midwestern Côte d'lvoire where this approach has been applied for the past five years and is giving interesting results. We begin with a rapid description of agriculture in terms of agrarian systems. This description emphasizes the agricultural dynamics referring to a typology of farming systems where fish culture is considered only on the basis of the constraints that it can help to eliminate. The work productivity in aquaculture is compared to that of other agricultural undertakings.
| Main Authors: | , , |
|---|---|
| Format: | conference_item biblioteca |
| Language: | eng |
| Published: |
ICLARM
|
| Subjects: | M12 - Production de l'aquaculture, Tilapia, aquaculture, développement rural, économie de production, structure agricole, http://aims.fao.org/aos/agrovoc/c_32720, http://aims.fao.org/aos/agrovoc/c_550, http://aims.fao.org/aos/agrovoc/c_6701, http://aims.fao.org/aos/agrovoc/c_26808, http://aims.fao.org/aos/agrovoc/c_202, http://aims.fao.org/aos/agrovoc/c_166, |
| Online Access: | http://agritrop.cirad.fr/512452/ |
| Tags: |
Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
|