Production Diversity and Food Diversification: An Analysis of Production and Consumption Logics of Farm Households in Tuy, Burkina Faso

Abstract

Consumption and production practices are part of the logics and habits of the different social structures. Every sociolinguistic community possesses its own food and cultural practices. Those practices and behaviors are not necessarily static. They can be influenced by external phenomena. This paper tries, through a socio-anthropological qualitative approach, to understand the consumption and production practices of rural households in the communes of Koumbia and Béréba. The study showed that the rural communities of Koumbia and Bereba have a diversity of cultivation practices and eating habits. However, this diversity of production does not correspond to what is consumed. The reason for this paradox stems from the perceptions that these communities have of food. Rural households are more focused an “eating their fill” than on the nutritional quality of what they consume. Thus, dietary behavior or food choices are ultimately much more determined by cultural values related to education, openness, curiosity, acquired and ethnic information than by technical-economic factors related to the resources of the farm or its environment as supported by classical theories. Food habits therefore remain determining factors in production and consumption practices. They favor change because societies are dynamic and highly functional in contact with modernity and the diffusionist current resulting in the mixing of cultures.