The government of Benin has initiated since 2006 many policies to promote crop diversification. The aim was to help rural household to be more resilient to food insecurity. The objective of this research is to determine how crop diversification has affected the food security status of the rural household. Primary data from 420 rural households were collected in the Collines Region in Benin. We use principal component analysis (PCA) to construct a multidimensional food security indices and a Simpson diversity index has been used to measure the degree of crop diversification. A linear regression model was used to determine the effect of crop diversification on household food security status. We found that crop diversification has a positive effect on household food security status. The diversity of crops grown through dietary diversity can improve household food security. In rural remote areas where household access to food depends largely on it production, crop diversification provides farmers with the different crops that they cannot access either because of the cost or because of the poor infrastructure constraints (physical access). Beyond, the results also show that some other factors are also affecting the household food security status such as access to extension services and storage facilities.

This study uses primary data collected from 522 farm households in the Collines region in Benin and Fractional Multinomial Logit to access and analyse the factors affecting cropland allocation in rural Benin, considering four groups of crops: cereals, root and tuber, legumes and other industrial crops. We found that land allocation between crops is a challenging process for rural household who have to consider many factors when choosing the size of cropland. Household size, access to extension services and fertilizer play an important role in allocating land for cereal crops while the type of labour use, the membership to farmer-based association and total land size affect household land allocation to industrial crops. The study recommends that the ongoing crop diversification policy in the country should be more inclusive and provide realistic support to every categories of farmers based on cropping pattern and also consider the agricultural land reforms.

This paper analyses the credit constraints' effect on non-farm entrepreneurship entry decisions in Benin. Using data from a sample of 512 farmers, we determine the factors that influence credit constraints and then assess the effect of credit constraints on non-farm entrepreneurship decisions based on an endogenous switching probit model and propensity score matching (PSM). The results of endogenous switching regression reveal that age and access to extension services are the main determinants of credit constraints while age, sex, household size, marital status, education level and farmer-based organisation (FBO) membership significantly increase farmers' decisions to engage in non-farm entrepreneurship. The PSM's results show that credit constraints have a negative effect on non-farm entrepreneurship entry decisions. The findings suggest that diversification through engagement in non-farm entrepreneurship requires the removal of credit constraints.