Journal of Agricultural Economics最新文献

Cooperation amongst natural resource users is key to manage ecosystems sustainably and achieve environmental goals proposed by policy and regulations. This paper focuses on the impact that livestock farming can have on the quality of a water body and investigates farmers' willingness to cooperate to preserve water quality under two different sources of uncertainty and four different degrees of uncertainty. The first source relates to the level of water quality that must be guaranteed in a river catchment to avoid irreversible deterioration of aquatic ecosystems (threshold uncertainty, i.e. with catastrophic consequences). The second source relates to the financial losses that farmers will experience in the long run if they fail to cooperate (impact uncertainty). To this end, a lab-in-the-field experiment was conducted with livestock farmers of Northern Ireland. A local public good game with threshold uncertainty was framed around an agri-environmental scheme designed to create ungrazed buffer zones for water quality preservation. Results indicate that uncertainty generally hampers farmers' cooperation and the provision of information geared to reduce uncertainty enhances it. Impact uncertainty has a milder negative impact on cooperation than threshold uncertainty. Risk preferences and probability weighting do not influence cooperation, while loss aversion has an influence on cooperation.

Extensive studies have been conducted on the link between armed conflict and agricultural production. However, the underlying mechanisms remain underexplored. A better understanding of these mechanisms could unpack the subsequent effects of conflict-induced food and welfare shortages, as well as identify promising policy interventions. We study the effects of terrorist violence on household agricultural production in Burkina Faso and explore the underlying mechanisms. To achieve this, we combine nationally representative five-year panel data on plots and households with spatial conflict data. Our analysis reveals negative and significant effects of terrorist violence on agricultural productivity and total output. Despite reducing cereal crop output, increased intensity of terrorist violence is significantly associated with higher production of cash crops, which require fewer inputs in Burkina Faso. Further investigations uncover that the decline in household agricultural productivity results from a significant decrease in the number of farming plots, land size, and short-term production investments, including chemical fertilisers and pesticides. These findings remain robust across various alternative empirical specifications and measures of violence, offering insights that can help policymakers faced with similarly scaled armed conflict. For instance, ensuring a secure environment and providing reliable access to essential production inputs, such as chemical fertilisers and pesticides, can help support conflict-affected household agricultural production during and after the violence periods.

This paper assesses the response of agricultural commodity markets to Russia's withdrawal from the Black Sea Grain Initiative (BSGI). Employing daily commodity-level data and event study methods, we analyse the impact on seven agricultural commodities and four key market metrics, including futures prices, historical and implied volatility, and speculative pressure. Our findings show a statistically insignificant increase of 1.1% in agricultural futures prices within the first seven trading days following the BSGI termination. In the following days, futures prices began to decline, eventually returning to levels below those observed before the withdrawal, a pattern further underscored by our implied volatility analysis. While there is no evidence of heightened speculation, we find some evidence for treatment differences across agricultural commodities. These findings suggest that traders did not believe in the likelihood of a blockade of Black Sea grain shipments.

Retail distribution is essential for the growth of markets for local food. While online direct-to-consumer and local food hubs are becoming more sophisticated, the largest market for local foods remains the traditional intermediation (retailing) sector. We develop an agent-based model to simulate the expansion, growth and profitability of retailers offering local foods across a landscape populated by consumers and competing retailers. We design a series of experiments to examine how changes in prices and assortment that include local and non-local options in the fresh produce category impact store market share and profitability. We validate the model, and conduct our experiments, using household fresh produce expenditures data from a retail food-delivery business in the Mid-Atlantic region of the US. We find that retailers offering a larger assortment of local foods are able to sustain higher basket-average retail prices and exhibit higher long-run profits in comparison to retailers that do not carry local options. These results underscore the importance of local foods in a food retailer's price and assortment strategy. The key implication is that retailers need to be conscious not only of the breadth but also of the quality of their assortment in their pricing strategies.

This paper investigates the impact of heat waves on the productivity of the Italian food industry. Using daily weather and firm-level data for the 2004–2019 period, we show that a heat wave causes, on average, a reduction in Total Factor Productivity (TFP) of about 3.2%. Smaller firms are more severely affected, with a reduction of approximately 7%, revealing unequal impacts within the same country and sector. The reduction in TFP can be partially attributed to lower workers' productivity, with labour input increased in order to compensate for productivity loss. The estimated effect is heterogeneous across subsectors, with some well-known Italian products (e.g., wine production) more severely affected by heat waves. These findings have significant policy implications due to the expected increase in the frequency of heat waves caused by climate change, and are particularly important in the case of the Italian food industry, which is mainly composed of small firms. The paper highlights the need to investigate further the impacts of heat stress on the entire food system, as most of the literature has predominantly focused on the agricultural sector.

Agriculture is vulnerable to extreme weather shocks. Climate change increases both the frequency and the intensity of such shocks. To safeguard farmers' income and food production, climate adaptation measures are required. This article aims to examine the effectiveness of crop diversification as an adaptation measure, using Italy as a case study. We apply a control function approach to a panel dataset of 20,790 Italian farms, which considers (i) the crop diversification decision and (ii) the influence of crop diversification on farmers' levels of crop income and income risk. We find that, while specialisation can increase income, crop diversification reduces income risk most effectively when growing four different crops. At this level of diversification, income risk is approximately 29% lower as opposed to monoculture farming. Although the Common Agricultural Policy's greening payments for crop diversification make sense from an ecological and risk-reducing point of view, we find that they are potentially insufficient to cover the loss of expected crop income from diversification. While crop diversification reduces income risk in general, we find no specific benefit in terms of weather shock-induced risks. This may be because a price increase following a weather shock buffers its adverse effect. However, identifying the reasons requires further research.

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.