Cattle Trade and Beef Consumption

Based on the concept of constrained social surplus maximization, a mathematical programming model was developed to analyze the market for cattle (live animals) and beef within a competitive market framework in the West African sub-region. The study applied the mathematical programming model to analyze trade in cattle and beef in the West African Central Corridor. Quadratic programming which maximizes the net social surplus in the Samuelson sense under a competitive market framework when farmers are risk averse was used. The simulation model allowed a multi-country analysis that treated the Central Corridor as ‘one huge market place’ in the context of a spatial equilibrium framework. This study applied the more commonly used mean-variance (E, V) method to account for the risk-averse behaviour of economic agents in the cattle sub-sector of the Central Corridor of West Africa. The basic assumption here is that the coefficient for aggregate risk aversion for a region or country should be equal to the sum of the individual risk aversion coefficients.