Organization and Performance of Cotton Sectors in Africa ... - infoDev

Box 4.2 (Continued)Second, farmers in Uganda may have more remunerative cash croppingoptions than in Tanzania. Providing some substantial input credit or extension,or both, is thus imperative if ginners are to attract farmers to cotton.Again, this provision may not be the case in the more remote north of thecountry. Finally, greater cultural homogeneity among Ugandan ginners mayhave facilitated collective action approaches that were infeasible in Tanzania.Differences in Zambia and Zimbabwe have less to do with regulatoryapproaches—both are attempting to consolidate their concentrated structures—thanwith the productivity that each has achieved. Zimbabwe’s annualmean yield from 1995 through 2004 was about 825 kg seed cotton per hectare(ha), compared to about 625 kg/ha in Zambia (chapter 10). Even in 2006,after several years of macroeconomic crisis and disrupted input distributionresulting from the entry of new players, the best-yielding 20 percent of Zimbabweanfarmers achieved mean yields of 1,750 kg/ha, while the top 4 percentof Zambian farmers reached only about 1,200 kg/ha. Zimbabwe’s superiorperformance in this regard is driven by the continuing influence of past performance.Before reform in 1994, Zambia’s Lintco was a small and decliningcompany, and little if any cotton research took place in the country. In contrast,Zimbabwe developed its Cotton Marketing Board (CMB) and an effectiveresearch system in the 1960s and 1970s to serve commercial farmers.After Zimbabwe’s independence in 1980, the CMB built systems for effectiveinput credit and extension to new smallholder farmers; farmers not includedin these systems were able to self-provision at least a basic set of input in thecountry’s relatively developed (by Sub-Saharan African standards) privateinput markets. COTTCO, the private sector successor to CMB, continued thiseffective performance into at least the early 2000s. Even today, after temporarilyscaling back its input credit support in 2005, the company provideshigh-quality support to many farmers.a. Indeed, the north of Uganda is beginning to open as this book is being finalized(mid-2008), and Uganda abandoned the quota system for the 2007/08 productionseason. It is not yet clear whether this decision was driven in part by the prospect ofexpansion into northern areas of the country.Place of the Cottonseed Oil Industry in the TypologyThis book considers the cotton sector as a whole, including the broad range ofactivities from seed cotton production through ginning to marketing of theresulting products (lint, seeds, oil, and cake). 42 As a result, the analysis includesa description of the way cottonseed oil industries are organized and how theycontribute to the sector’s performance. An argument made in this study is thatperformance of oil and cake sectors is becoming increasingly important andthus requires more attention than it has received to date. Also, in some cotton60 POULTON AND TSCHIRLEY