Abstract
Africa has been hesitant to adopt agricultural biotechnology, lagging behind global trends over the past decade. One exception is Burkina Faso, a West African country that commercially released 125,000 ha of Bt cotton in 2009. Bt cotton may serve as a working example of how African countries can enhance sustainability using modern, science-driven technology to increase production levels while reducing input use and energy consumption. This paper reports the potential impact that Bt cotton can have on sustainability in Burkina Faso’s cotton sector based by summarizing empirical evidence from previously published studies. Based on the summary of published data collected from six years of field trials and producer surveys, Bt cotton increased cotton yields by an average of 21.3% and raised income by $106.14 per ha. Using an energy balance model, the introduction of Bt cotton would also result in a 6.6% saving in energy use. The significant increase in productivity and economic returns could be the catalyst for Burkina Faso, and other African countries, to emerge from the decade or so of stagnation and regain their competitive stance in world cotton markets while providing environmental and social benefits.
Highlights
Cotton has been produced in West Africa since the French colonial period [1]
Results found that Bollgard II obtained higher cotton yields than the three years of field trials conducted in the previous three years, with an average yield of 34% over the two years of on-farm trials (Figure 4)
The higher returns from the adoption of Bacillius thurengiensis (Bt) cotton are explained in Ismael et al [74] as a combination of two factors: higher cotton yields and lower pesticide costs that act to offset increased Bt cotton seed costs, similar to what was found in this study
Summary
Cotton has been produced in West Africa since the French colonial period [1]. During its formative years following independence in the early 1960s, the West African cotton sector was able to substantially increase production by rapidly introducing new agricultural technology [2,3,4]. The early success of cotton production in West Africa is typified by Mali and Burkina Faso (Figure 1) Cotton yields in both countries increased from an average of roughly. 200 kg ha−1 in 1963 to highs of 1400 kg ha−1 in the middle part of the 1980s [8] During this period of technological change, development in the West African cotton sector was achieved primarily through crop intensification, rather than the traditional approach used by African farmers whereby production is increased by land-extensive means. The. Sudanian cotton zone was the traditional base of cotton production in the region where it was concentrated during the French colonial period, but over the past three decades it has spread into the Sudano-Guinean zone to the south (Bassett 2001) [1]. Both of those agro-ecological zones are able to support rain-fed cotton production, with average annual rainfall of 600–800 millimeters (mm) in the Sudanian zone and average annual rainfall of 800–1100 millimeters in the Sudano-Guinean zone.
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