Masters and Sanogo
Welfare Gains from Quality Certification
977
The Market for Complementary
Foods in Mali
holds took their advice: it turns out that cow-
peas are difficult to store and so are not usu-
ally available throughout the year, while the
processing effort required was prohibitive par-
ticularly in periods of peak agricultural labor
The principal foods traditionally fed to infants
in Mali are moni and rui, two kinds of porridge
made from millet or sorghum flour, fortified
with lemon, tamarind juice, sugar, sour milk,
6
demand. The FTL addressed the storage and
processing constraints with mechanized pro-
duction and plastic packaging, which also per-
mitted the development of an improved recipe
theycalledMILEG, composedof67.6%millet,
4
and other ingredients (Bauer et al.). Samples
have been found to have very low caloric den-
sities, around 35–45 kcal/100 g of dry matter
2
0% cowpea, 5% maize, 5% raw sugar, 1.2%
(Baueretal., Gerbouin-RerolleandChauliac),
vanilla sugar, and 1.2% iodine salt.
which is one-tenth of the caloric density in
C e´ r e´ lac or similar products (USDA, Lutter).
Our survey of mothers in Bamako, the cap-
ital city, found that about 50% of mothers use
only rui, moni, or other family foods as com-
plements to breastmilk, while 39% purchased
some C e´ r e´ lac or other industrial complemen-
tary food, and 11% used none at all. This is
comparable to the nationwide results found
in Mali’s 1995/96 Demographic and Health
Survey (DHS) (Tr e` che).
Industrial production of MILEG began in
February 1995, under contract to a newly es-
tablished private food processing unit called
the “Fabrique Alimentaire du Sahel” (FAS)
in Bamako (Gerbouin-Rerolle and Chauliac).
7
Significant sales were achieved in 1995, but
in 1996 demand declined and by May 1997
MILEG production had stopped completely.
In 1997, another private firm, the “Unit e´ de
Transformation et de Conditionnement des
Denr e´ es Alimentaires (UCODAL),” emerged
to replace FAS as a supplier of pre-packed
complementary foods. They developed a
broader range of products, eventually sell-
ing three different composite flours based on
millet/maize/cowpea, sorghum/maize/cowpea,
Initiatives to lower the cost and increase the
availability of fortified foods were launched
in Mali and across Africa in the 1980s (e.g.,
ICRISAT, 1990, 1992; Nicholson; Onofiok and
Nnanyelugo). These included a wide variety
of recipes and processing systems. The bench-
mark product, Nestl e´ ’s C e´ r e´ lac, is a precooked
mixture generally based on wheat and skim
milk powder, plus sugar and micronutrients.
The lowest-cost mixtures procured for the
World Food Program (Dijkhuizen) or U.S.
PL480 food aid (Marchione) are also pre-
cooked but are based on maize and soy-
beans, while products based on traditional
infant foods in tropical countries have included
many other processing techniques and ingredi-
and rice/fonio/maize mixed with dried fish
8
(
Mariko). UCODAL had a production ca-
pacity of 500 kg per month in 1999, and like
FAS almost all its sales were to public health
services.
Meanwhile, other production and mar-
keting techniques were under development
elsewhere in Mali. In 1993, a French NGO op-
erating at Diafarab e´ , in the remote Mopti re-
gion of northeastern Mali, began assisting a
group of women to produce small batches of
complementary foods by hand, on commission
from local health services. This activity repli-
cated a project that the same NGO had been
operating since 1982 in Burkina Faso (Porter
5
ent lists.
The approach taken by Mali’s Food Tech-
nology Laboratory (FTL) was initially to pro-
mote a mixture of 80% pearl millet and 20%
cowpeas, both of which are widely grown by
smallholders for home consumption. The FTL
is a unit of the Institut d’Economie Rurale
6
(
IER), the national agricultural research ser-
The procedure recommended by FTL involves hulling, win-
nowing, washing, drying, sifting, milling, and sifting again through
a 0.6-mm mesh (Ha ¨ı dara, 1990). Milling is particularly difficult
vice, and initially it followed a traditional farm-
extension model, encouraging households to in rural areas, where motorized mills are rare and grain must be
make the flour at home (Ha ¨ı dara, 1989; Bauer
et al.; Silva-Barbeau et al.). But few house-
pounded in a mortar using a pestle.
7
In November 1995 output reached 95 kg/day, or 38% of the
firm’s theoretical production capacity. Although at one point MI-
LEG was available at eighty pharmacies around Bamako, almost
all actual sales were to public health and nutrition services. The
4
Moni is prepared as a family breakfast food with an uneven
texture, of which adults and older children eat the denser granules,
while infants consume only the more liquid base. Rui is prepared
as a smooth porridge expressly for infants.
firm’s failings were analyzed in three donor-funded studies in 1996,
which found that the firm had weak management and marketing
systems, and that the product no longer met the nutritional norms
expected from the original recipe (CECI, Ke ¨ı ta, Gerbouin-Rerolle
and Chauliac).
5
The oldest and most widely-known of the low-cost infant foods,
8
Incaparina, was introduced in Guatemala in 1961 as a ready-to-
Fonio is a cereal grain produced in the Sahel, but not widely
cook flour containing cottonseed (Scrimshaw, Wise, Tartanac).
disseminated to other areas.