Invited paper presented at the 6th African Conference of Agricultural Economists, September 23-26, 2019, Abuja, Nigeria Copyright 2019 by [authors]. All rights reserved. Readers may make verbatim copies of this document for non-commercial purposes by any means, provided that this copyright notice appears on all such copies. Crop diversification and poverty reduction: The role of access to road in Niger Mahamadou Roufahi Tankaria,1 , Katrin Glatzela, Kathrin M. Demmlerb aInternational Food Policy Research Institute, Dakar, Senegal. b Centre for Environmental Policy, Imperial College London, London, UK. Abstract Crop diversification is considered as a climate-smart agriculture practice widely adopted by smallholder farmers in Niger due to its many benefits including increased resilience, control of pests and diseases, yield stability, food diversity and poverty reduction. However, its impact on welfare may be limited when farm households do not have access to basic infrastructure such as roads, which are so crucial for access to markets. This paper aims to show how crop diversification affects farm households’ poverty status and severity under access to road constraints in Niger. The estimations are based on probit and tobit models using a panel data set provided by the Surveys of Living Conditions of Households and Agriculture of Niger for the years 2011 and 2014. The identification strategy dealt with unobserved households’ characteristics which may be a source of bias following Mundlak’s (1978) approach. The findings show that the effect of crop diversification on poverty levels varies depending on the degree of a farm household’s access to roads. The higher the distance to road, the lower the reduction of poverty due to crops diversification. By removing access to road constraints, the Nigerien government could leverage the benefits of crop diversification strategies on poverty reduction. Keywords: Crop diversification, Climate-smart agriculture, road infrastructure, poverty, Niger. 1Corresponding author Email: [email protected] / [email protected] 1. Introduction Like other Sahelian countries, Niger depends strongly on its agricultural sector for food production and employment. The sector is the country’s main employer with more than 80% of the workforce employed in the agriculture sector, contributing to 40% of Niger’s GDP. However, this sector faces constraints that hinder its development. For instance, its productivity is low, and the sector is also exposed to several natural shocks including droughts, heats, floods and insects’ attacks. The climate related shocks are often those affecting more severely the agriculture sector (World Bank 2013). In recent decades, there have been a rise in temperatures and a decrease in average precipitation yielding to major droughts, affecting not only Niger but also the entire Sahel region (Druyan 2011; IPCC 2013). Therefore, the livelihoods of Niger’s rapidly increasing population, growing at a rate of 3.8%, are deteriorating, especially those of rural households depending mainly on agriculture for their food and income. Estimates show that in 2014 more than 45% of Nigerien were living in poverty (INS 2016). Ninety percent of those poor lived in rural areas. Furthermore, 48% of rural households suffered from chronic malnutrition, and among them more than 20% lacked access to food and were extremely vulnerable in 2014 (Herderschee et al. 2014). One widely adopted coping strategy by farmers in Niger against production risk is crop diversification (Bello 2016). In India, evidence shows that by protecting smallholders from output price fluctuations and increasing dietary diversity at household level, crop diversification was recognized as the most environment-friendly practical way for strengthening agricultural households’ resilience against uncertainties, particularly among smallholders (Joshi 2005). Similarly, in Niger, it was found that crop diversification improves significantly the welfare of the most vulnerable households when they adopt it against climatic or market shocks (Asfaw et al. 2018). In addition, anchoring crop diversification in agricultural policy for a more positive impact of farming on households’ welfare has been widely promoted at international level. For instance, FAO recommends crop diversification to countries in order to effectively develop agriculture sustainably, improve food and nutrition security and create more jobs for poverty reduction (FAO 2012). However, to fully benefit from crop diversification, farm households need access to roads for agricultural produce transport to markets as not all the cultivated crops can be consumed at household level. In fact, roads infrastructure has the capacity to reduce poverty thanks to the transport sector perfection which enhances access to market (Gachassin et al. 2010). For example, in Kenya access to roads connects farmers to food value chains and markets in nearby towns or the capital city and enables them to negotiate higher prices for their produce (Mati 2008). In addition, by facilitating access to food markets, access to roads may increase households’ food security and nutrition. In Niger, distance to market was found as a determining factor for the levels of food security of households (Tankari, 2015). Therefore, access to roads may determine how crop diversification strategies can contribute to poverty reduction. Yet, in Niger, the road network is still very limited. In rural areas, the road density barely reaches 0.6 km per 1000 km2 which is the lowest in Africa due the fact that the road network represents only 7,371 km of classified road (Montaud et al. 2016). The available road network in Niger, in addition to allowing rural households movement, it also serves for transport of input and output between the production areas and markets and thus plays a crucial role in production and trade decisions. (Montaud et al. 2016). The capacity of rural road network to impulse agricultural sector growth is well recognized in the literature. (see for example Calderon and Serven 2010; Gwilliam 2011 or Domínguez-Torres and Foster 2011). Investment in rural road network was among the prioritized actions of the Government of Niger, to achieve its commitment for the Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Programme (CAADP) by repairing, upgrading or constructing up to 500km of roads annually. This paper aims to show how crop diversification affects farm household poverty status and severity, that is whether crop diversification can reduce farm household’s poverty under access to road constraints in Niger. The methodology is based on econometric estimations using probit and tobit models by controlling for unobserved heterogeneity of households. The panel data for Niger, Surveys of Living Conditions of Households and Agriculture (ECVMA) 2011 and 2014, are used for empirical evidence. The outcome variables are indicated by the poverty status and poverty gap of farm households. Crop diversification is measured as the ratio of the number of crops grown by a household in a given year to total number of different crops grown in the household vicinity or community during the same year. The constraint of access to road is measured in terms of distance from household to a main road. Following the introductory section, we review the literature on how farm household poverty is affected by crop diversification strategies and on the role access to roads. In the third section, the methodology and the data used are detailed and discussed. The presentation and discussion of the findings are conducted in the fourth section. The last section is devoted to conclusions. 2. Literature Review and theoretical framework Crop diversification is the production, in a given area, of more than one crops variety of the same or different species by rotating crop and or intercropping (Makate et al. 2016). Due some of its benefits including increase of resilience, controls for pests and diseases, yield stability, food diversity, and higher spatial and temporal biodiversity on the farm, crop diversification is also considered as a climate-smart agriculture (CSA) practice (Holling 1973; Joshi 2005; Lin 2011). Theoretically, there are two main pathways that can be used to hypothesize how crop diversification affects farm household poverty (Mazunda et al. 2018). First, crop diversification can directly alter the food intake of a family if it consumes what it produces. By adopting a crop diversification strategy, a farming family produces a more diverse set of foods providing access to a more diverse diet. However, even net consumer households benefit from crop diversification through improved access to a more diverse set of foods to choose at markets. Second, farming diversified crops including marketable higher-value crops can lead to increased income for farm families where local markets can offer producers competitive prices for those crops, which farmers then can, in turn, spend on more diverse and more nutritious foods and non-food items including healthcare and education (Mazunda et al. 2018). In northern Benin evidence shows that a group of women famers by producing more crops including, tomatoes, okra, peppers, eggplants, carrots, and other green vegetables increased their production which allowed them to keep up to 18% of their harvest to feed their families and to sell the surplus at local markets. The additional income earned from sales was used to increase the quantities of items including staples, protein and oil in the households