{"title":"The transition incentive program and women farmers in the USA","authors":"","doi":"10.1016/j.foodpol.2024.102739","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>The US Department of Agriculture made women farmers eligible for the Transition Incentive Program (TIP) to improve their access to farmland. TIP is a federal program that transfers near-expiring lands in the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) back to agricultural use while maintaining established conservation practices. It offers incentives to landowners and requires recipients to adhere to specific conservation plans on the acquired land. Since women have shown a stronger interest in sustainable practices and face more limited access to land, TIP has the potential to enhance women’s presence in farming. However, the program’s effectiveness has not been evaluated.</div><div>In this paper, we analyze county-level data from the 2017 Census of Agriculture and data on actual TIP use to provide the first estimates of the causal effect of TIP on the presence of women farmers. We use three matching techniques – nearest neighbor, kernel nearest neighbor, and inverse probability weighting – and find a small but statistically significant positive effect. While a comparison of the share of women farmers in non-matched counties with and without TIP-enrolled lands shows that counties with TIP use have fewer women farmers, the matched results indicate that utilizing TIP increased the proportion of women farmers by one percent, or about 805 women, in the study region. The Rosenbaum bounds sensitivity test shows that the results are stable. We conclude that TIP is marginally effective at increasing the number of women in agriculture.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":321,"journal":{"name":"Food Policy","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":6.8000,"publicationDate":"2024-10-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Food Policy","FirstCategoryId":"97","ListUrlMain":"https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0306919224001507","RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q1","JCRName":"AGRICULTURAL ECONOMICS & POLICY","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
The US Department of Agriculture made women farmers eligible for the Transition Incentive Program (TIP) to improve their access to farmland. TIP is a federal program that transfers near-expiring lands in the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) back to agricultural use while maintaining established conservation practices. It offers incentives to landowners and requires recipients to adhere to specific conservation plans on the acquired land. Since women have shown a stronger interest in sustainable practices and face more limited access to land, TIP has the potential to enhance women’s presence in farming. However, the program’s effectiveness has not been evaluated.
In this paper, we analyze county-level data from the 2017 Census of Agriculture and data on actual TIP use to provide the first estimates of the causal effect of TIP on the presence of women farmers. We use three matching techniques – nearest neighbor, kernel nearest neighbor, and inverse probability weighting – and find a small but statistically significant positive effect. While a comparison of the share of women farmers in non-matched counties with and without TIP-enrolled lands shows that counties with TIP use have fewer women farmers, the matched results indicate that utilizing TIP increased the proportion of women farmers by one percent, or about 805 women, in the study region. The Rosenbaum bounds sensitivity test shows that the results are stable. We conclude that TIP is marginally effective at increasing the number of women in agriculture.
美国农业部让女性农民有资格参与过渡激励计划 (TIP),以改善她们获得农田的机会。过渡激励计划是一项联邦计划,旨在将保护储备计划(CRP)中即将到期的土地转回农业用途,同时保持既定的保护措施。该计划为土地所有者提供激励措施,并要求接受者在收购的土地上遵守特定的保护计划。由于妇女对可持续实践表现出更浓厚的兴趣,且获得土地的机会更为有限,因此 TIP 有可能提高妇女在农业中的地位。在本文中,我们分析了 2017 年农业普查的县级数据和 TIP 的实际使用数据,首次估算了 TIP 对女性农民存在的因果效应。我们使用了三种匹配技术--最近邻、内核最近邻和反概率加权--发现了微小但在统计上显著的积极影响。对有和没有使用 TIP 的非匹配县的女农民比例进行比较后发现,使用 TIP 的县的女农民人数较少,但匹配结果表明,使用 TIP 使研究地区的女农民比例增加了 1%,即增加了约 805 名妇女。罗森鲍姆边界敏感性测试表明,结果是稳定的。我们的结论是,TIP 在增加农业女性人数方面略有成效。
期刊介绍:
Food Policy is a multidisciplinary journal publishing original research and novel evidence on issues in the formulation, implementation, and evaluation of policies for the food sector in developing, transition, and advanced economies.
Our main focus is on the economic and social aspect of food policy, and we prioritize empirical studies informing international food policy debates. Provided that articles make a clear and explicit contribution to food policy debates of international interest, we consider papers from any of the social sciences. Papers from other disciplines (e.g., law) will be considered only if they provide a key policy contribution, and are written in a style which is accessible to a social science readership.