Impact Of Agricultural Market Reforms On Smallholder Farmers In ...

credit, while another third of the northern villages report that “most” farmers get input credit. In
contrast, two-thirds of the villages in the South say that “none” of their farmers get inputs on credit.
4.2.4 Activities of groupements villageois and groupements feminins
The groupements villageois (GVs) play an critical role in agricultural marketing in Bénin,
distributing inputs on credit to cotton farmers and acting as an agent of Sonapra in the collection of
cotton. The groupements feminins (GFs) play a different and less well-documented role in
agricultural marketing. The purpose of this section is to describe the activities of these two types of
farmer organizations and explore some of the changes in them since 1992 25 .
Groupements villageois
As is well-known, GVs are much more common in the cotton-growing areas of the North
and Center of Bénin. According to the IFPRI-LARES Community Survey, 91 percent of the
villages in the North have at least one GV and 79 percent of those in the Center do. By contrast,
only 39 percent of the villages in the South have a GV. Among villages in the South that do have
GVs, the incidence of multiple GVs is higher than in the North and Center (see Table 4.2.13).
This geographic split is also found in the activities carried out by the GVs. In the North and Center,
the vast majority of GVs (85-90 percent) are involved in cotton marketing and the distribution of
fertilizer, seed, and pesticide/herbicides. In the South, however, GVs are primarily involved in the
marketing of maize and other food crops, with only a quarter of them participating in input
distribution. Few GVs anywhere are involved in marketing cash crops other than cotton or in
agricultural processing (see Table 4.2.14).
Most of the GVs involved in marketing maize and other food crops handle less than half the
quantity marketed within the village. In contrast, GVs are usually able to dominate cotton
marketing because of Sonapra’s legal monopoly on cotton marketing (see Table 4.2.15).
Examining maize marketing activities by region reveals that northern GVs are more successful in
handling a large proportion of the maize marketed by the village. In contrast, 80 percent of the
GVs in the South market less than half the maize sold within the village (see Table 4.2.16).
25
As part of the same project, IFPRI and LARES also carried out a survey of GVs, the results of which
are available in a separate report.
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