Comparative Advantage in Demand and the Development of Rice Value Chains in West Africa
Comparative Advantage in Demand and the Development of Rice Value Chains in West Africa
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DOI：
10.1016/j.worlddev.2017.04.004
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发表时间：
2017-08-01
影响因子：
6.9
通讯作者：
Kinkpe, A. Thierry
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
Demont, Matty;Fiamohe, Rose;Kinkpe, A. Thierry
非洲国家大米发展战略往往以供应为重点，并隐含地假设消费者很容易用进口大米替代国产大米。然而，由于进口依赖度不断提高，城市消费者对大米的偏好已偏向于亚洲出口质量标准，非洲大米难以与之竞争。轶事证据表明，在靠近港口且远离 3000 多年前驯化非洲稻米的文化遗产地理中心的城市，这种进口偏见更为严重。我们特意选取了五个西非城市市场作为样本，这些市场由国外和国内大米价值链供应，且距最近港口和文化遗产中心的距离不同，并进行基于拍卖的框架田间实验，分析城市对品质特征升级的国内大米需求的驱动因素。我们发现，西非大米在城市市场上与进口大米的竞争越来越困难，消费者越欣赏亚洲进口大米的特性，距离港口越近，与大米文化遗产的地理和家谱距离越远。这些挑战为政策制定者努力实现西非稻米自给自足的价值链升级提供了重要的见解。我们的研究结果表明，价值链升级的最佳投资组合是目标终端市场及其与港口和稻米文化遗产的距离的函数。终端市场距离港口越近，就越需要投入更多的资金，通过质量升级、品牌推广和促销来提升国内大米的需求，以使其能够与进口大米竞争。另一方面，靠近文化遗产中心赋予大米价值链“需求比较优势”，需要较少的需求提升投资，并为供应转移投资留下更多空间。 (C) 2017 Elsevier Ltd. 保留所有权利。
National rice development strategies in Africa are often supply-focused and implicitly assume that consumers will readily substitute imported for domestic rice. However, due to increasing import dependency, urban consumer preferences for rice have become biased toward Asian export quality standards, against which African rice has difficulties to compete. Anecdotal evidence suggests that this import bias is higher in cities close to the port and remote from the geographical centers of cultural heritage where African rice was domesticated more than 3,000 years ago. We purposely select a sample of five West African urban markets which are supplied by both foreign and domestic rice value chains and which are located at varying distances from the nearest ports and centers of cultural heritage, and conduct framed field experiments based on auctions to analyze the drivers of urban demand for domestic rice with upgraded quality characteristics. We find that West African rice has increasing difficulties competing against imported rice on urban markets the more consumers appreciate characteristics of imported Asian rice, the closer to the port, and the further the geographical and genealogical distance from rice cultural heritage. These challenges provide crucial insights into value chain upgrading in policy makers' struggle to achieve rice self-sufficiency in West Africa. Our findings suggest that the optimal portfolio of investment in value chain upgrading is a function of the targeted end-market and its distance from the port and rice cultural heritage. The closer the end-market is located toward the port, the more investment is needed in lifting demand of domestic rice through quality upgrading, branding, and promotion to enable it to compete against imported rice. Proximity to centers of cultural heritage, on the other hand, endows rice value chains with a "comparative advantage indemand," requiring less investment in demand-lifting and leaving more room for supply-shifting investments. (C) 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.