Agricultural profiles and priority needs of producers on Madagascar’s eastern coast

On the eastern coast of Madagascar, farms rarely depend on a single agricultural activity. Households combine food crops, cash crops, fruit production, and, in some cases, fishing and livestock farming under strong climatic constraints and uncertain market conditions. This study aimed to identify profiles of agricultural practices and rank producers’ priority needs in order to better understand farm decision-making logic and support better-targeted interventions. Two questions guided the analysis: which profiles emerge from the combination of observed practices, and which needs occupy a central position according to producers? A systemic approach was adopted, based on a cross-sectional survey of 395 households. Agricultural practices, coded as binary variables, were analyzed using multiple correspondence analysis, followed by hierarchical cluster analysis and discriminant analysis to test class robustness. Farmers’ needs were extracted from a corpus of open-ended responses, converted into a lexical matrix, and then ordered using a matrix of significant correlations presented as a Program Evaluation and Review Technique (PERT) diagram. The results identified three contrasting producer profiles and revealed a hierarchy of needs structured around productive capacities, access to finance, and marketing conditions. These findings highlight the value of combining typological and network-based approaches and provide a basis for better-targeted agricultural interventions in eastern Madagascar.