Obstacles To Technology Adoption for Small and Medium Farms in the Arid and Semi Arid Areas of Maghreb

The agricultural sector in the Maghreb is characterized by small and medium farms (approx 3 million) that are very vulnerable due to their size and the very uncertain climatic conditions. In the arid and semi arid areas, the majority of them combine livestock activities (mainly small ruminants) with cereal crops and olive trees. The liberalization in the framework of world or regional agreements (WTO, Euro-Mediterranean agreements, etc.) may accentuate the vulnerability of these farms with the decrease of subsidies and price support. However, some of these farms hold considerable productive potential and solutions can be found through adapted institutional arrangements (including public policies, market organization), to the structural constraints related to land tenure, credit access, etc... The aims of FEMISE II project are to analyze the obstacles to technology adoption in the semi-arid and arid areas and to assess the different institutional measurements that can hamper or facilitate the technology change process. This project measures up to other ICARDA Projects in these areas, especially the Mashreq/Maghreb Project, on the “Development of Integrated Crop/Livestock Production Systems in Low Rainfall Areas of the Mashreq and Maghreb Regions”. The technical dimension could not be separated from the economics, organizational, institutional, social, political or even cultural components. We suppose that the innovation is partially induced by the environment of the farmers. So attention is paid to supply/demand conditions for outputs and inputs and public policies at national or regional level, institutional constraints related to land management, labor and credit at the community level and risk perception at the farm level. Some information was collected among the traders (for live animals and feeds) or the decision makers (regional authorities). A household survey in each community (60 households in Algeria, 117 in Morocco and 45 in Tunisia) was conducted for descriptive analyses and typology. To understand the obstacles to the technology transfer, we developed mathematical programming models for each community that would allow simulating and assessing some institutional or political changes on the technology adoption process. If the models were quite similar between the communities, different modelling options were chosen: 1) the development of a stochastic model in Ait Ammar (Morocco) to understand the impact of the insurance system in an uncertain environment; 2) the use of the Positive Mathematical Programming in the Algerian community that would consider all the 60 households in the model; and 3) the development of a dynamic programming model in Tunisia and Algeria to consider the dynamic trend of the plantations and the livestock.