Analysis of Potatoes Growing Decisions with the Analytic Hierarchy Process Method in Burundi

Potatoes croping are paramount in Burundi and almost all the provinces of the country grow potatoes. However, there are several varieties of potatoes grown in Burundi. Farmers are facing with the difficulties of deciding which right variety of potatoes to grow. This work was carried out for helping farmers to make the right choice of the variety to grow. An Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) method has been used. The Ndinamagara, Ingabire and Victoria potatoes varieties were the different decisions alternatives. The Prices of seeds, Yield, Marketing, Cost of producing and Sustainability were the mains criteria that were taken as the accountment for taking the decision process. In this work, it was a question of developing a multi-criteria decision-making process and determining the appropriate potatoes production system with the AHP method. The results shown that each criteria had it own highly preferred variety. According to the seed price criterion, the Victoria variety was found to be more important than the others. The Victoria potatoes had a priority weight of 66.4%. Since the coherence ratio was less than 0.10, the matrix was seen as coherent. For the yield criterion, the Ndinamagara variety has a weight of 50.1% and the consistency ratio was less than 0.10. According to the marketing criteria, the Ndinamagara variety still had a weight of 60.7% of points and the consistency ratio was also less than 0.10 and the matrix was also consistent. For the production cost criterion, the Victoria variety has a weight of 70.2%. For the sustainability criterion, the Ndinamagara variety has been found to be more important and had a weight of 0.776 points and the consistency ratio was 0.10. In concluding, for the final decision, the Victoria variety was determined to have a greater weight (48.6%) than the Ndinamagara variety (31.8%) and the Ingabire variety represented as the last with a rate of 19.6%. Considering the results of this work, the suitable potatoes variety was decided as Victoria variety.