Economic drivers of pesticide use in Cameroon

Pesticide use in Cameroon has increased dramatically over the past three decades, raising concerns about human and environmental health. Although the economic mechanisms of pesticide use have been widely studied in Europe and the United States, this topic has rarely been explored in tropical countries, primarily due to the poor quality of available data. In this paper, we address this issue by using FAOSTAT data that has been cross-checked with the recently released GloPUT database to improve data reliability. We consider three main mechanisms: the effect of pesticide import prices, agricultural product prices, and labour availability. We used two independent methods to investigate the economic mechanisms of pesticide use: econometric analysis and a farmer survey. Our findings suggest that pesticide use is relatively inelastic with respect to its own price, with elasticity values greater than −1. However, due to a lack of statistical power, the significance levels of our estimates are relatively low, which warrants caution when interpreting the results and drawing conclusions.