FSSIM-Dev, a bio-economic farm household model for agri-food policy analysis: application to Smallholders in Sierra Leone

This paper presents a generic farm-household model for use in the context of low income economies in order to gain knowledge on food security and rural poverty alleviation. It is a static positive programming model which simultaneously solves a set of microeconomic farm models reproducing the behaviour of representative farm households. This model is designed to capture key features of low income economies agriculture such as the non-separability of production and consumption decisions due to market imperfections, the inter-linkage between transaction costs and market participation decision, the heterogeneity of farm households, the interaction among farm households for factor markets and the seasonality of farming activities and resource use. Model use is illustrated in this paper by simulating the impact of agrifood policy on the livelihood of representative farm households in Sierra Leone and, more specifically, on land use, production and marketing of basic food commodities, farm-household’s welfare and poverty level.JRC.J.4-Agriculture and Life Sciences in the Econom