Will promotion of coarse grain processing turn the tide for traditional cereals in the Sahel? Recent empirical evidence from Mali
1997
Boughton, D. | Reardon, T.
The paper examines the determinants of household purchases of already-processed millet, sorghum, and maize in urban Mali. The results allow that these purchases (as well as those of rice) rise with the opportunity cost of women's time as well as with household income. The results for the two most important coarse grains in the Sahel (millet and sorghum) differ widely, however; while raw millet and processed millet are similarly affected by income and women's opportunity cost of time, the results for raw sorghum are the opposite of those for procesed sorghum. Whereas improving sorghum processing wlll increase total sorghum demand as urban income rise, the same cannot be said for millet. Three sets of subsector policies would increase demand for processed coarse grains: (1) promoting access to and use of abrasive-disk dehullers at the semi-wholesale level; (2) promoting improvements in the quality and cleanliness of the grain available to dehullers, and instituting grading by grain quality in the marketing system; (3) increasing consumer information about possible savings realized on purchases of dehulled cereals, via for example, the Malian Market Information System (SIM).
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