Socioeconomic and institutional determiners of durable technological innovations in the food-producing agriculture of Cameroun

The challenges posed by food security for populations in sub-Saharan Africa and the fact that extensive production systems are reaching their limits in food-producing agriculture imply accelerating technological innovation toward ecological intensification of agricultural production systems. A review of research on plantain banana in Cameroon since 1988 revealed how institutional innovation enabled hybridization of different forms of research (fundamental, systems, and action research) and reinforced the organizational innovation required for technical change. Evaluation of impacts underlined the complementarity between an increase in productivity and in income in rural areas, the production of human and social capital and the protection of forest resources. (Résumé d'auteur

Identification of banana production systems in urban and peri-urban agriculture in Yaoundé

Urban development is one of the main features of socioeconomic change familiar to developing countries: it presents the problem of increasing the food supply to respond to the food requirements of the urban consumers (Dury et al. 1999). Although peri-urban agriculture provides favourable conditions for the intensification of production systems, there is little work on the subject which applies particularly to banana. We propose to do this for the peri-urban agriculture of Yaoundé (1.4 million inhabitants), the capital of Cameroon, situated in the Central province. (Résumé d'auteur