Comparative analysis of the economic and financial performance of intensive rice-growing systems and conventional rice-growing systems in the communes of malanville and karimama in northern Benin

With the strong global population growth, coupled for some time now with the appearance of the health and security crises and the war in Ukraine, the global economy in general and that of Benin in particular, is destabilized. This has led to a surge in commodity prices, with rice in the spotlight almost doubling in its import price. At the same time, in Benin, the rice potential is poorly exploited. In this context, the objective of the study was to compare the economic and financial performance of the Intensive Rice and Conventional Rice farming systems at the level of farmers in the communes of Malanville and Karimama in northern Benin.To achieve this, univariate analysis and mean comparison based on the two-sample Wilcoxon test were carried out on 368 respondents to compare the differences in the means of each performance index between the two types of rice farming systems. The results indicate that for rice farmers who both practice the complete technology packages of systems, the difference in averages is not significant for total costs, gross product in value, gross and net margins; and the Benefit-Cost Ratio. On the other hand, there was a highly significant difference at the 0.1% level for Average Labor Productivity and a very significant difference at the 0.01% level for the Internal Rate of Return. Based on these results, the study postulates that in order to improve the economic and financial performance of the IRS, access to inputs needs to be further facilitated.