Burkina Faso cotton — the cooperative model after the Western donors left

<p>Burkina Faso was, by the early 2000s, the largest cotton producer in sub-Saharan Africa, and SOFITEX — the state ginning company — was the institutional spine of a cooperative-based smallholder cotton economy that connected roughly 300,000 farming households to world markets. Donor-funded research at INERA (Institut de l&#x27;Environnement et de Recherches Agricoles) produced the agronomic basis; the Union Nationale des Producteurs de Coton du Burkina (UNPCB) negotiated prices on behalf of farmers; the World Bank financed working capital. After the 2022 and 2023 coups and the post-coup expulsion of French and many other Western donors, that institutional network has had to reorganize.</p> <p>What survived and what didn&#x27;t is instructive. SOFITEX, partially privatized in the 2000s, has continued operating. The cooperative input-credit model — fertilizer and seeds advanced at planting, repaid at harvest from the ginning proceeds — still functions, though working capital is now sourced from Bank of Africa and from the Banque Internationale du Burkina rather than from World Bank intermediation. World cotton prices have been more friendly to producers in 2023–2024 than in the structural-adjustment decade, which has cushioned the donor withdrawal.</p> <p>What has degraded is research support and pest management. The cotton bollworm and the cotton stainer bug require continuous integrated pest management; INERA&#x27;s capacity to produce and update IPM protocols depended substantially on French CIRAD research collaboration, which was suspended after the 2023 break. The Bt cotton experience — Burkina commercialised Monsanto Bt seed in 2008, abandoned it in 2016 over staple-length quality issues — left scars; replacement breeding programmes have been slow to fill the gap.</p> <p>The geopolitical reorientation has produced new partnerships. Russian agricultural firms have offered input financing arrangements; the Alliance of Sahel States (Mali, Burkina, Niger) has discussed pooled marketing arrangements to recreate some of the bargaining weight previously held through the CFA-zone West African Economic and Monetary Union. Whether any of these structures will deliver the technical depth that the old donor-funded system provided remains an open question.</p> <p>Ndongo Samba Sylla has argued that the Burkinabè cotton sector is an interesting test of post-Françafrique agricultural sovereignty. The interim verdict is mixed: smallholders are earning slightly more, the institutional capital built up over decades is partially eroding, and the medium-term productivity trajectory depends on whether replacement research and input partnerships scale fast enough to outrun the depreciation of the old ones. Two years is too soon to tell. Five years will tell.</p>