Agricultural Economics最新文献

Biodiversity loss on agricultural land is progressing while European farmers’ participation in agri-environmental-climate schemes (AECS) is limited. Meanwhile, weather extremes are increasingly affecting agricultural production and, thus, land management decisions. Using a discrete choice experiment in Southern Germany, we explore determinants of farmer participation in biodiversity AECS. Management flexibility emerged as a key factor for scheme adoption. Farmers who experience negative impacts from climate change or have pessimistic expectations about future climatic conditions tend to invest less in non-productive AECS if they believe they have effective adaptation practices that support continued crop production. To ensure the transition to sustainable food production in the future, our results highlight the need to design and promote sustainable adaptation strategies to climate change in addition to AECS. Our results also highlight the need to consider different farm types, considering that forage farms seem less reactive to climatic changes.

Agricultural subsidies are a key policy tool for improving farm productivity, yet their effectiveness depends on how they interact with land market conditions and farmers’ behavioral responses. This study examines the pathways through which coupled and decoupled subsidies influence farm-level production efficiency in China, focusing on farmland market rental distortions and farmers’ perceived tenure security. Using nationally representative household-level survey data and a multilevel chain mediation model, the results show that both types of subsidies are positively associated with farm-level production efficiency. However, only coupled subsidies exhibit significant indirect effects on farm-level production efficiency by reducing farmland market rental distortions and enhancing farmers’ perceived tenure security. In contrast, decoupled subsidies display limited transmission through these intermediate mechanisms. Further analysis reveals that the indirect effects of coupled subsidies are more pronounced in major grain-producing regions, where farmland market structures and subsidy targeting are better aligned. These findings suggest that farmland market conditions play a critical role in translating subsidies into productivity gains and that improving subsidy design to better reflect local farmland market rental distortions and tenure security can enhance their overall effectiveness.

Adoption of improved crop varieties fuels agricultural productivity, but the impact of their adoption over time remains unexplored. Building on a randomized experiment fielded in 2017, we explore the long-term adoption and impacts of a successful intervention with a genetically modified eggplant variety (Bt eggplant) in Bangladesh. We study the extent to which households exposed through this intervention to Bt eggplant continued to grow it after 5 years, and whether exposure to the improved variety had post-intervention impacts on a battery of eggplant-, agricultural-, economic-, and women's empowerment-specific outcomes. We find wide-scale dis-adoption of the Bt eggplant technology, driven primarily by difficulties in accessing seed as well as the absence of post-intervention support by extension specialists and implementors. Notably, we observe a change in seed-sourcing behavior in households exposed to Bt eggplant, with a shift towards the formal seed sector. We see no other effects on a variety of eggplant- and agriculture-related outcomes. We find no evidence that exposure to Bt eggplant at the household level had any positive or negative impact on dimensions of women's empowerment. This study is the first to demonstrate empirically that if delivery strategies and support structures are not sustained, short-term benefits alone are not sufficient to guarantee long-term adoption of improved varieties.

Climate and weather shocks pose significant threats to crop and livestock systems, leading to economic losses and humanitarian crises. Utilizing a modeling framework that innovatively integrates the crop and livestock production systems in semi-subsistence economies, this study examines the interactions and dynamic adjustments within these systems following weather shocks, using Ethiopia as a case study. We also evaluate the effectiveness of various adaptation strategies in sustaining farm incomes, food security, and welfare. Results show unique effects on the crop and livestock sectors resulting from a joint shock on the two systems. While food crops experience a strong and immediate growth effect (12.4%) that fades quickly, the livestock sector faces the full impact of the shock a year later (13.7%), with the effect persisting to some degree. We also find diverging economic and livestock system adjustment trajectories from separate shocks to the crop and livestock systems. Further, the intervention options analyzed show contrasting impacts on various outcome indicators, with only the resilient crop intervention causing sector-indifferent impacts. Our findings emphasize the importance of proactive measures to enhance the resilience of crop-livestock systems, with implications for policy and practice aimed at safeguarding food security and livelihoods in semi-subsistence economies.

Mkupete, M. J., and Davalos, J. 2025. “Implications of Climate-Smart Agriculture Technology Adoption on Women's Productivity and Food Security in Tanzania.” Agricultural Economics 56: 247–267. https://doi.org/10.1111/agec.12874.

We inadvertently omitted an important acknowledgement of the financial support that made this research possible. The article should include the following acknowledgement:

This work was carried out with financial and scientific support from the Partnership for Economic Policy (PEP) through funding provided by Global Affairs Canada (GAC).

We sincerely apologize for this oversight.

Animal health and livestock disease constrain food security, education, and the wealth of households. Assessment of the impacts of animal health and livestock diseases on the well-being of the live animal and value chain actors, as well as consumers, helps to quantify the efficiency of resource allocations in the livestock sector and to improve stakeholder decision-making. In this paper, we aim to illustrate how the impact of improved animal health affects the well-being of economic agents of the livestock sector of an economy. We specify a vertically integrated partial equilibrium livestock model to identify disease free equilibria as a special case of the Kuhn–Tucker conditions. We provide empirical evidence from a case study on the small ruminant meat value chain of Ethiopia. We find that the total surplus increase for a disease free small ruminant sector is USD 780 million under constant consumer demand. If meat demand increases according to the FAO projection, the surplus gain increases to USD 1.2 billion. Overall, our results support that economic agents across the value chain benefit from improved livestock health.

The adoption of higher-nutrient grass varieties, such as Brachiaria, offers long-term economic benefits for ranchers while enhancing soil health and pasture productivity in Latin America's lowland climates. Despite widespread adoption, the field-level impacts remain largely unexplored. This study, focusing on Colombia's largest beef-producing regions, analyzes how the transition to introduced pastures affects productivity, revenue, and land requirements for ranching. Our findings reveal that 66% of pasture acreage among sampled ranchers is now comprised of these introduced varieties. Factors like distance to technology centers, historical violence, and shocks to transportation and trade, hinder adoption. Transitioning from native savannas to introduced pastures significantly boosts productivity, particularly when paired with practices such as weed control and fertilization; however, yield gains fall short of the expectations set by agronomic trials. Overall, the increased revenue per hectare underscores the need to promote introduced-pasture-based systems, especially given the limitations of intensive silvopastoral methods.