Agricultural Policy Reforms and Food Poverty Dynamics in Côte D’Ivoire

The main objective of this paper is to show how relevant is the incentive policy to agricultural investments for food poverty reduction towards agricultural households. The data used for this study are from the 1985-1988 CI-LSMS and the 1998 National Statistics Institute’s Household Surveys. We estimate a model of Rotating Panel to stress on the State intervention for food poverty reduction through private agricultural investment. The itinerary analysis of the households classified food poor or not food poor according to the necessary and advised caloric threshold allows to observe the living standards of agricultural households between 1985 and 1988. The computed results support that using State intervention to provide agricultural services improves the caloric intake of the agricultural households through the private investment incentive. On the contrary, the progressive withdrawal of the State at the end of 1986 pushed down the daily consumption of several households below the recommended caloric threshold. These outcomes suggest that the debate on suppressing or not suppressing State agricultural subsidies in the poor countries be revisited.