Determinants Influencing Cocoa Farmers’ Satisfaction with Input Credit in the Nawa Region of Côte d’Ivoire

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report (New Reviewer)

1. the paper is largely well-articulated.

2. Long paragraphs should be broken into 3-5 sentence chunks.

3.  Are your data accurate to six decimal places?  These are survey data; percents with one decimal place are sufficient.

4.  Multivariate coefficients to six decimal places are clearly an example of misplace precision.  Three decimal places are sufficient.  You want to reduce the number of numbers in the tables to facilitate inspection by the reader.

3. You cannot just say you used random sampling.  This is drive-by research methods.  You need to tell us what list you used, what stages, how respondents were finally chosen.  Refusal / participation / response rate?   Did you you use a table of random numbers or computer -generated numbers?  What was the sampling frame at each stage (if multi-stage sampling?). 

French ans in tables and text should be English years.

Author Response

Dear Editors and Reviewers:

Thanks for the sincere and very constructive comments in a quest for the improvement of our manuscript. We have revised the manuscript as per recommendation and in accordance with proposed suggestions, questions, and comments in a careful manner. All changes in the manuscript are in green font color. The suggestions brought forward by the reviewers are very important in ensuring the manuscript's quality before publication. We hope and believe that the revisions embedded herewith will meet the journal’s requirements. If you have any questions, please let us know. Many thanks.

Best regards,

Yao Dinard KOUADIO

 

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report (New Reviewer)

Dear Editor, 

I carefully read the study titled “Determinants influencing cocoa farmers' satisfaction with input credit in the Nawa region of Côte d'Ivoire”. This study mainly aimed to identify potential factors affecting farmers' satisfaction with IC in Republic of Côte d'Ivoire. The data used in the study were collected through a questionnaire from a random sample of 311 farmers in Nawa. The study findings showed that 61.97% of the farmers were not satisfied with the use of IC, while 38.03% were satisfied.

I think the study was reviewed a short time ago and the reviewers requested revision. It is understood that the study has been revised at certain points. However, there are still deficiencies in the study. In this context, I would like to make some suggestions to the authors. After this revision, I think the manuscript will be of better quality.

First of all, there are typos in many places in the manuscript. Spelling is wrong in many places. For example, lines 11, 73, 573 are incorrect.

Why is some data used in the input based on an old date? No up-to-date data/reports available? For example, According to International Cocoa Organization 2012.... Why 2012?

There are some shortcomings in the introduction. For example, what kind of gap is there in the existing literature? Have such issues been studied in the literature? How does this study contribute to the literature? These questions should be answered clearly.

At the end of the introduction, information should be given about how the rest of the study was designed.

The conclusion is not bad, but it could be a little more striking. Perhaps stronger and more realistic policies can be suggested.

 

 Best regards, 

Moderate editing of English language required. 

Author Response

Dear Editors and Reviewers:

Thanks for the sincere and very constructive comments in a quest for the improvement of our manuscript. We have revised the manuscript as per recommendation and in accordance with proposed suggestions, questions, and comments in a careful manner. All changes in the manuscript are in green font color. The suggestions brought forward by the reviewers are very important in ensuring the manuscript's quality before publication. We hope and believe that the revisions embedded herewith will meet the journal’s requirements. If you have any questions, please let us know. Many thanks.

Best regards,

Yao Dinard KOUADIO

 

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report (New Reviewer)

This is an interesting paper with some weaknesses and requires some revisions to be considered to be published in Sustainability.

1. The sentence in lines 36-38 should be further elaborated as it is the raison d’ etre of manuscripts argumentation.

2. Given the journal’s scope, the authors should place the whole discussion under sustainable development. Thus, a short discussion of the term should be provided in the introduction. In this vein, the following two papers should be included. (a) Manioudis, M. & Meramveliotakis, G. (2022) "Broad strokes towards a grand theory in the analysis of sustainable development: a return to the classical political economy", New Political Economy, 27(5), pp. 866-878, and (b) Tomislav, K. (2018) "The concept of sustainable development: From its beginning to the contemporary issues", Zagreb International Review of Economics & Business, 21(1), 67-94. This short argumentation may be placed in lines 61-62, where the authors discuss inclusive economic growth and development.

3. The practical implications for policy-makers should be evidenced by referring to the existing literature. For example, see M. Aliber and R. Hall (2012) “Support for smallholder farmers in South Africa: Challenges of scale and strategy”, Development Southern Africa, 29 (4): 548-562.

4. The author’s reference to COVID-19 consequences is not incorporated in the core of their argumentation (lines 71-73). They have to provide a more analytical/critical exemplification here.

5. Are there any other surveys that map out the satisfaction with the input credit’s performance? Section 2.2 needs further elaboration.

6. The presentation of the questionnaire should be more analytical.

7. It would be helpful if the authors provided us with a more analytical matrix of policy recommendations.  

Minor:

1. Please use one decimal number.

2. Data regarding cocoa production in Africa should be evidenced.

 

Moderate editing of the English language is required.

Author Response

Dear Editors and Reviewers:

Thanks for the sincere and very constructive comments in a quest for the improvement of our manuscript. We have revised the manuscript as per recommendation and in accordance with proposed suggestions, questions, and comments in a careful manner. All changes in the manuscript are in green font color. The suggestions brought forward by the reviewers are very important in ensuring the manuscript's quality before publication. We hope and believe that the revisions embedded herewith will meet the journal’s requirements. If you have any questions, please let us know. Many thanks.

Best regards,

Yao Dinard KOUADIO

 

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report (New Reviewer)

Dear Editor,

I carefully examined the revision. The authors have applied all the revisions specified in the cover letter. The study can be published.

Best regard,

Moderate editing of English language required

Reviewer 3 Report (New Reviewer)

I believe the authors have sufficiently addressed my previous comments and that their additions have improved the paper.

Moderate editing of the English language is required.

This manuscript is a resubmission of an earlier submission. The following is a list of the peer review reports and author responses from that submission.

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

I appreciate the author (s) efforts in conducting this research. However, this research doesn't furnish anything new. I would say it is oversimplified. 

Reviewer 2 Report

General comments

Several statistics describing the cocoa sector are quite old. Is it not possible to get more recent data?

The descriptive data does not provide a good picture of the trends in the sector. At what rate is production increasing or decreasing? Is the location of production shifting from some locations to others? Are yields increasing? How do yields compare across production regions?

The term “departments” is not standard. It would be preferable to use “jurisdiction” if Soubre and Meagui are, indeed, different governmental entities or, perhaps “regions” if not.

The study is about the satisfaction of producers with input credit, but the terms innovators, technology, and IC technology are used throughout the paper. What is the relationship between input credit and technology? Are cocoa producers using credit to purchase these technology (fertilizer, pesticides, machines, etc.) selling these technologies? Do you mean “input credit technology” which literally would mean technologies used to provide input credit?

The theoretical framework must be completely reworked. If the purpose of the study was to “determine the factors influencing farmers’ satisfaction with input credit” then the theory should describe how producer satisfaction is affected by their characteristics, and the characteristics of the input credit they are offered. While both are important, the characteristics of the input credit is the most easily adjusted to increase satisfaction. You state in section 2.1, that “Two factors affect how well the IC performs: number one, the user's subjective assessment of the technical performance, and number two, the user's perception and attitude toward the innovator's perception and moods.” First, “subjective assessment of technical performance” of what? Do you mean the technical performance of input credit, or the performance of inputs? If the latter, you must state this clearly. Furthermore, you must link the input credit to the use of inputs.

The theoretical framework section focuses on the evaluation of innovative technologies, not on input credit. Section 2.2 focuses on satisfaction with technology, not with input credit.

Section 2.3 does deal with satisfaction with input credit, but this is the section where, hypotheses flow from the theory. The one sentence section three describes the null hypothesis but not the alternative hypotheses. These are discussed in section 4.3 which should be carefully integrated into the theoretical framework section. The discussion should describe how each factor relates to satisfaction with input credits. The specific alternate hypotheses follow from the discussion, and determine if the significance test is a one-sided or two-sided test. The two-sided tests (an effect with indeterminant sign) should include reasons why the effect of the variable can be positive or negative.

Following the revised theory section the description of the method used to investigate the hypothesis should be described.

Next the study area can be described, the data to be collected, and the survey instrument discussed. It is important you this section include the actual questions (or translation of the questions) addressed by the respondents. In particular it is important the wording of the satisfaction variable is included so that the reader understands the information contained in the data. For example, does the question relate strictly to the availability and satisfaction with the effort required to qualify for credit, did it include an assessment of the technology purchase with the credit, etc.

The paper leaves some confusion about the number of respondents to the survey. While the paper indicates that there were 305 respondents, the total number of respondents in the two regions in Tables 2 and 3 is 311.

It seems that the categorical variables, Farm size, Age, and Education dummy variables which is appropriate. In the discussion of the results you describe the effects of these variables as single probability changes. Explain how you distill a series of several coefficients into a single probability change.

Specific comments

 

Line 83-84:         You say, “… the user's perception and attitude toward the innovator's perception and moods. Are the “users’ and the “innovators” the same people? Later you discuss the interactions between the farmers and innovators, which suggests they are not the same. Who are the innovators?

Line 130:             An area cannot be between a longitudinal line and a latitudinal line—it must be between to longitudinal lines and two latitudinal lines.

Line 204:             Describe the strata used to stratify the sample.

Table 2:               “Family size” should be changed to “Farm size”

Table 4:               How should the reader interpret “Total” in this table.

Lines 429-430:   You write, “The results showed that increasing the size of a farm by one unit made it less likely that a farmer would be very satisfied with IC by 0.23.” First, what is “one unit?” How should we interpret the decline in probability 0.23 in terms of farm size?

Line 490:             Here you introduce the concept of cooperative agricultural inventors and leaders. Who are agricultural inventors, or did you mean innovators?

Reviewer 3 Report

 

The study addressed an important issue for promoting cocoa production in Cote d’Ivoire. However, the following are the major concerns I have on the article:

When we talk about farmers’ satisfaction with a credit system, the fundamental determinants are going to be related to the mode of operation. In this study, the authors identified three factors which are availability of inputs, accessibility, and credit repayment conditions. I was expecting to see these factors as the principal independent variables in the model. Unfortunately, they were not captured. Integration of demographic characteristics of farmers as independent variables is not a bad idea, but to really inform policies and operational mechanisms of credit operators, those three indicators should have formed the core of the analysis. This is a major limitation that I observed in the study.

In addition, we also found some variables like education being ordinally estimated instead of being estimated as dummy variables. It is also not clear why the authors decided to estimate some quantitative variables such as land areas qualitatively.

The theoretical framework should focus more on attributes of credit operations and their impacts on consumers’ satisfactions.

There is the need to provide clear statements on what makes this study unique from previous studies.

The sampling procedures are too shallow. On what basis was stratification done? What were the strata? Provide information on estimated population of farmers in each stratum and justify allocation of samples.

The authors stated that they used STATA 26 for data analysis. The latest STATA I know of is STATA 17.

It is not clear why age and farm size, which are continuous variables were converted to ordinal variables.

The proposed model has annual production as one of the independent variables. Did the authors test for endogeneity in their proposed model? This model may have suffered from endogeneity concerns given the inclusion of annual production.

Provide a section on the limitations of the study.

Focus on using Cote d'Ivoire and not Ivory Coast.