Cash Cropping Incentives, Food Marketing Performance And The Divergence Between National And Household Comparative Advantage: Evidence From Zimbabwe

Abstract

A growing body of evidence throughout Sub-Saharan Africa argues for the pursuit of a food security strategy based on diversification of smallholder agriculture into high-valued cash crops. The empirical record suggests that, in many semi-arid areas, cash crops such as cotton, sunflower and groundnut provide higher returns to land and labor than food grains and thus present major opportunities to promote smallholder income growth, food security and national foreign exchange generation. Empirical findings have also shown that, to the extent that food and cash crops require labor or draft inputs at different periods, crop diversification may generate a significantly higher value of output for a given bundle of inputs.