Journal of Agricultural Economics最新文献

Financial savings at the household level are vital for poverty alleviation, yet they face social, psychological and institutional obstacles. Over recent years, mobile phones have proven effective in enhancing financial inclusion. However, when individuals decide how to save, their preferences remain unclear. This study investigates the preferences of 421 Malian smallholder farmers for a hypothetical mobile savings application using a discrete choice experiment. Apart from standard savings account features such as transaction charges, interest amount and minimum deposit requirements, it assesses preferences for two innovative features designed to address deviations from rational decision-making. The first feature allows multiple users to pool their savings, utilising social dynamics and peer pressure to encourage responsible savings behaviour and enhance commitment. The second feature offers users the ability to manage their finances more effectively by dividing them into purpose-specific sub-accounts. The findings reveal a strong overall preference for saving via the application rather than keeping cash on hand. As anticipated, farmers favour lower costs and deposits and higher interest amounts. Generally, individual saving is preferred over group saving, and the option to compartmentalise is valued, albeit not statistically significantly so. However, the analysis of underlying heterogeneity reveals substantial differences in respondents' preferences for these commitment-enhancing features. These findings underscore the need for customised approaches that align with farmers' unique preferences and constraints. Such approaches can inform the development of bespoke mobile savings solutions for farming households, thereby boosting their resilience and financial well-being.

Terroir is a pivotal concept in defining collective quality labels for agricultural products, such as geographical appellations. With climate change likely to significantly impact these appellations' delimitations, an in-depth understanding of terroir's various dimensions becomes imperative. Yet, the literature presents diverse and multifaceted definitions of terroir, making it a challenging concept to delineate. Utilising 913 articles from 1986 to 2023 sourced from Scopus and adhering to the SPAR-4-SLR bibliometric protocol, we conducted a science mapping that includes analysis of document co-citation, co-authorship, bibliographical coupling and keyword co-occurrence to elucidate terroir's definitions, research fields and issues. We propose a bibliometric analysis methodology that enables detailed mapping of the concept by disciplinary fields. The proposed methodology is applicable to systematic literature reviews aimed at studying a domain while incorporating the diversity of scientific disciplines in which it is investigated. Our analysis confirms that, in terms of agri-food sectors, the literature predominantly focuses on wine. More specifically, within the fields of business, economics and social sciences, the primary applications of the concept are with respect to geographical indications and climate change. Research conducted in agricultural and biological sciences facilitates a better characterisation of terroirs in terms of microbial characteristics. This increasingly enables a distinction to be made between the soil—i.e., the terroir place—and the quality of agri-food products. Future analysis can make use of this knowledge, as well as that on the cultural dimensions of terroir, to better understand the economic impacts of the different dimensions of terroir.

There is scope for improving the sustainability of intensive dairy farms through the uptake of sustainable production practices such as more grass-based feeding systems. Such feeding systems can reduce feed-food competition and the environmental impacts of feed production, among other farm-level and societal benefits. However, empirical research on how farmers' feed choices mis(align) with sustainability transitions and the associated drivers is limited. This paper explores the trade-offs that farmers make between the environmental, social and economic sustainability impacts of grass-based feeding systems based on data from Swedish dairy farmers. Using an identity-based utility framework and a hybrid latent class model, we find substantial heterogeneity in dairy farmers' trade-offs between feed-related sustainability attributes: greenhouse gas emissions, biodiversity, animal welfare, feed self-sufficiency, feed cost and milk yield. Furthermore, our findings demonstrate that farmers who are strongly interested in the environmental and social sustainability impacts of their dairy feeding systems, beyond economic gains, are motivated mainly by their pro-environmental and pro-social identities. Overall, our findings imply that identity-enhancing interventions are promising policy instruments for encouraging the uptake of more grass-based feeding systems.

This paper evaluates the effect on livestock production and rural population of the land consolidation (LC) processes that occurred over recent decades in Asturias, an autonomous region located in north-west Spain. We use a novel Difference-in-Difference (DiD) model which allows for multiple LCs at different points in time and for spatial spill-overs. As many parishes have been involved in two or more LC processes, we test whether we can simplify our analysis using a specification for these parishes that accumulates the effect of consecutive, and often distant, LC processes. We find that this simplification can be implemented when we analyse the effect of the LC processes on parishes' livestock production, but not when we examine their effects on parish population. We find that parish livestock production increases on average by about 3% once we take into account spatial effects, and that LC processes have especially attenuated the decline in the number of farms in (coastal) parishes where dairy farms predominate. We do not find strong evidence regarding the effectiveness of LC processes in redressing rural depopulation, except in some of the parishes located in western Asturias.

Submissions fell back slightly in 2023 to 474 manuscripts but remain above pre-Covid levels. Despite the high number of submissions, there has been little change in the number of papers accepted for publication, with the acceptance rate in 2023 standing at 8%. The acceptance rate is considerably higher for papers originating from Europe and North America. Accepted papers are now routinely made available online as ‘Early View’. The Journal's Impact Factor fell back slightly for 2022, but still compares favourably with other journals in the field of agricultural economics. Operational changes include revisions to the journal's webpage and authors' guidelines and a newly configured editorial team.

In this paper we examine whether there are significant gender differences in the adoption of climate-smart agricultural (CSA) practices in sub-Saharan Africa. Using individual-level data from four sites in Kenya, Uganda and Senegal, our empirical analysis provides robust evidence that men have a higher likelihood of adopting high-return CSA practices including modern chemical fertiliser, improved high-yielding varieties and drought/pest tolerant livestock practices. In contrast, women tend to have a higher likelihood of adopting low-risk and low-return traditional CSA practices such as water harvesting, crop covering, rangeland management and pest management. Our subsample analysis shows significant heterogeneity in the gender gap across countries. The results of the decomposition of the observed gender gap show that personal values and norms, access to weather and production information and farm characteristics are important factors that explain the gender differential in the likelihood of CSA adoption. Our findings imply that equalising access to key resources such as plots of land, information and decision making power will be crucial to close the gender gap in the adoption of CSA practices. This is particularly important given the differential impacts of climate change between men and women in sub-Saharan Africa.

Poor health conditions of livestock cause sizeable losses for many farmers in the Global South. Veterinary services, including vaccinations, could help but often fail to reach farmers under typical smallholder conditions. Here, we examine how the provision of a vaccine against East Coast Fever (ECF)—a tick-borne disease affecting cattle in Africa—can be designed to reduce typical adoption barriers. Using data from a choice experiment with dairy farmers in Kenya, we evaluate farmers' preferences and willingness to pay for various institutional innovations in vaccine delivery, such as a stronger role of dairy cooperatives, new payment modalities with a check-off system, vaccination at farmers' homestead, and bundling vaccinations with discounts for livestock insurance. Our data reveal that farmers' awareness of the ECF vaccine is limited and adoption rates are low, largely due to institutional constraints. Results from mixed logit and latent class models suggest that suitable institutional innovations—tailored to farmers' heterogeneous conditions—could significantly increase adoption. This general finding likely also holds for other veterinary technologies and services in the Global South.

Input subsidy programmes (ISPs) remain a popular but contentious policy tool to promote agricultural intensification, food security and poverty reduction across Africa. Although previous studies have explored the impact of ISPs on various smallholder outcomes, no studies have analysed the impact of recent ISPs on pest management. This is particularly important given the increasing pest challenges due to climate change and the recent surge in pesticide use in low-income countries and its associated negative consequences for human and environmental health. Thus, this study assessed the effects of ISPs on smallholder adoption of sustainable pest management practices, using data from 1048 smallholder maize plots across major maize-producing zones of Zambia and a control function regression approach. We find consistent evidence that input subsidy receipt is negatively associated with smallholders' adoption of environmentally friendly and sustainable pest management strategies. Participation in the Zambia ISP (particularly the flexible e-voucher system) encourages synthetic pesticide use, at the expense of sustainable practices. We also find that farmers consider synthetic pesticides and biopesticides as substitutes and are more likely to adopt sustainable pest management when they have tenure security and access to financial resources. Given the human and environmental health consequences associated with synthetic pesticide use, it would be important to leverage input subsidy schemes to promote the adoption of safer and more sustainable alternatives to synthetic pesticides. Beyond input subsidies, policies that improve tenure security and financial access for smallholders can promote the adoption of sustainable pest management practices.

The integration of smallholder farmers into emerging value chains for fine-grain and aromatic ‘premium quality rice’ (PQR) could prove to be crucial to improving rural livelihoods in Bangladesh, though efforts could be constrained by farmers' differing levels of agronomic knowledge. Based on a pre-analysis plan, we analyse farmers' ability to efficiently allocate production enhancing inputs in PQR cultivation based on a survey of 1420 farmers in key PQR producing areas. Farmers received a hypothetical budget to allocate to six different inputs advised for efficient production of PQR, mimicking familiar production decisions made seasonally on their own farms. Our results suggest that even without budget or input access constraints farmers tend to inefficiently allocate inputs in PQR in this hypothetical setting. In particular, they tend to overspend on seeds, fertiliser and pesticides. Farmers with better access to agricultural information, such as through PQR specific extension services, conversely reach substantially higher efficiency scores and decided to spend significantly less on fertiliser. Without future adjustments such as more targeted extension services, implied higher production costs will likely lower the profitability of PQR cultivation for smallholder farmers, thereby limiting potential income gains. Besides these economic concerns, excessive input use is associated with environmental externalities. Improved efficiency is therefore desirable from both an economic and environmental standpoint.

Index-based microinsurance is a promising risk management tool for smallholder farmers. Recently, several mobile-delivered insurance schemes have entered the market. Depending on the degree of digitisation of the product, farmers can learn about the insurance, register, pay premiums and receive payouts via a mobile phone. As cell phone usage and network coverage constantly increase, digitally enabled insurance distribution may overcome previous barriers for insurance adoption. Still, farmers' preferences for these products remain largely unknown. We address this knowledge gap by means of a discrete choice experiment applied to 499 maize farmers in Mali. The experiment presents an easy-to-understand multi-peril crop insurance linked to a greenness index. It focuses on attributes related to the distribution channel and product design. Using mixed logit models, we find that the insurance attributes enabled by mobile-delivery are attractive to farmers. Product bundles that include mobile-delivered weather information and agricultural advice in addition to the insurance policy or credit access increase the likelihood of farmers taking out insurance. Similarly, recommendations from fellow farmers increase interest in the insurance product. The results are highly relevant for future product improvements that are needed to increase adoption rates and ultimately realise the loss-hedging potential of microinsurance.