Do producer organisations promote environmental sustainability through organic soil investments? Evidence from Cameroon

ABSTRACT

This study examines the relationship between cooperative membership and investments in organic soil amendments in Cameroon. We use switching regressions to reduce selection bias and estimate differential equations for both cooperative members and non-members. Cooperative membership exhibits a positive and significant relationship with the use of organic soil amendments such as farmyard manure and compost. Building on this, we further examine actual-counterfactual relationships where we find cooperative membership to be beneficial to both members and non-members should they be members. We also highlight significant heterogeneities and differential associations in the drivers and constraints of organic soil investments.

KEYWORDS:

• Agricultural cooperatives
• soil amendments
• intensification
• switching regressions
• organic fertilisers
• Cameroon

Acknowledgement

The author is grateful to the Editor and Reviewers for deep comments and suggestions which greatly improved the paper. I am also thankful to Jules Rene Minkoua for sharing the household-level data. Immense thanks to Adam Kurczewski, Richard Nyiawung, Sebastian Yong, Akem N. Fabinin and Isaac Nunoo for their constructive feedback and comments on different versions of this paper. The paper also benefitted from discussions with Helen Shuri, Adrian Kum, Denis Ngong and Betty-Harriet Ndep and editing support from Yousra Salama. Finally, many thanks to the participants of the LICOS KU Leuven seminar series, to which an earlier version of this paper was presented in March 2021. The findings in this manuscript are mine and should not be construed to represent the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) that I work for. All errors are my own.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Organic soil amendments have been shown to recover degraded lands and improve land productivity.

2. From a brief review of the literature, most of the studies on cooperative membership have been on Ethiopia and China.

3. In Cameroon, agricultural cooperatives are geographically spread in different villages and farmers can join cooperatives either where they live or move to another cooperative in another town or village. As the services offered by most cooperatives are somewhat homogenous, membership is usually driven through social networks. So, the more one’s network is made up of cooperative members, the higher the probability that the representative household will also join cooperatives through the peer network effect.

4. The sampling plan was informed by the Fourth Cameroon Household survey in 2015.