Evaluating Farmer Compliance in Rice Contract Farming: Empirical Insight from Burkina Faso

The rice sector in Burkina Faso faces major constraints, including soil degradation,irregular rainfall, pest pressure, and weak private sector engagement. Contractfarming offers a pathway to strengthen coordination across value chains, but itssuccess depends on farmers’ compliance with contractual clauses. This studyexamines the determinants of contractual compliance among rice producers usingdata collected from a random sample of 400 farmers in Bama and Donna. Ageneralized ordered logit model is employed to relax the proportional oddsassumption, allowing the effects of explanatory variables to vary across differentdegrees of compliance. This modeling strategy captures important heterogeneitiesin farmers’ responses and offers a more comprehensive and nuanced understandingof compliance behavior than traditional binary or proportional-odds models.Findings show that both farmer characteristics (education, cooperativemembership, farming experience) and contract-specific factors (duration,monitoring, payment modalities, and training) significantly affect compliance.Education and cooperative membership enhance the probability of partialcompliance, while monitoring mechanisms and timely payments encourageadherence to multiple clauses. By contrast, longer-term contracts and greaterfarming experience lower the likelihood of full compliance, reflecting risk aversionand skepticism linked to past contractual failures.