An economic comparison of typical dairy farming systems in South Africa, Morocco, Uganda and Cameroon.

Population growth, urbanisation and increased per capita milk consumption are main reasons for recent increasing milk demand in Africa. Due to globalisation, it is important to know how competitive various production systems are, especially as most governments promote local production and disfavour dairy imports. The TIPI-CAL (Technology Impact, Policy Impact Calculations model) was used to analyse and compare costs and returns of predominant dairy farming systems in South Africa, Morocco, Uganda and Cameroon. Results show that, as farms grew larger in size, family resources (especially land and labour) became insufficient and there was need for their acquisition from external sources. Though extensive dairy farming systems had the lowest cost of milk production (<20 US-$ per 100 kg milk), their input productivities and milk yields were lower, leading to very low net cash returns from dairying. Large intensive farms in South Africa had relatively low costs (<30 US-$ per 100 kg milk) and a high Return on Investment (ROI) due to a higher efficiency of input utilisation. It was concluded that, intensification of dairy farming and simultaneously increasing the scale of production will greatly increase productivity of farm inputs, thus recommended for development of the dairy sector in African countries.