Agricultural Economics最新文献

Agricultural extension can have direct and important impacts on vulnerable populations, strengthening both rural livelihoods and urban food security through technology adoption and increased agricultural production. Digitally-supported extension utilizing mobile phones can be a cost-effective method for delivering information to farmers. However, different digitally-supported extension delivery mechanisms may have differential impacts on farmer knowledge and behavior, especially (i) in the face of new and emergent threats to farm production, and (ii) in crises or violent conflict when trust in outside information is low and conventional extension channels are disrupted. We conducted a randomized controlled trial to evaluate two digitally-supported extension designs—direct SMS and a novel hybrid lead-farmer-supported SMS method—in delivering fall armyworm management guidance to maize farmers in Myanmar after a military coup. Both approaches improved farmer knowledge. There is suggestive evidence that the lead-farmer-supported group spent more on pesticides and hired labor compared to the control group and used pesticides more effectively in damage control than the SMS group.

With the rise of market-led development, marketing cooperatives have emerged that offer smallholder producers a guaranteed minimum price for their cash crops. Their existence is threatened when members side-sell a part of their harvest to outside buyers. We conduct a framed field experiment with indigenous coffee producers in southern Mexico to examine the effect of four factors on the marketing decision: additional income, the presence of microcredit and/or technical assistance, average outside buyer price, and harvest quantity. Our results show that participants allocate on average 82% of their harvest to the certain-price buyer. Changes in harvest quantity and outside-buyer price have minimal effects. The offer of complementary services has a null effect. Moreover, 22% of the participants always allocate their entire harvest to the certain-price buyer. Extra income increases this probability by 10%. Subgroup analysis reveals that this effect is limited to existing cooperative members.

The agri-food sector is a key contributor to greenhouse gas emissions and is also the economic sector most at risk from climate change. The sector is heavily protected by government intervention, particularly through trade policy, which can have significant environmental implications by either promoting or hindering the trade of polluting versus clean goods. In this paper, we study to what extent the pattern of trade policy hinders or promotes GHG emissions embedded in imported agri-food goods, focusing on three main pollutants as follows: carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide. Our findings reveal a significant environmental bias in agri-food trade policy, with most countries effectively applying a negative carbon tax—that is, an implicit subsidy—for all the pollutants considered. Notably, the structure of the trade policy of the European Union countries implies a substantial implicit carbon subsidy, while more polluting countries, such as China and Brazil, apply smaller carbon subsidies or even a carbon tax. The results have important implications for current mitigation policy.

This paper investigates methodological issues related to attribute non-attendance (ANA) in choice experiments (CEs). First evaluates the variation in the prevalence of ANA across various non-hypothetical choice experiments (NHCEs) elicitation formats compared to hypothetical choice experiments (HCEs). Second, it investigates whether eliciting respondents’ self-reported ANA after each choice set (choice task (CT)) or at the end of the choice task (seria task (ST)yields comparable results. Finally, it examines how incorporating self-reported ANA information affects respondents’ willingness to pay (WTP) and the external predictive powers of the estimated choice models. To answer these research questions, four treatments were conducted: HCE, NHCE, non-hypothetical rank-order discrete choice experiment (NHROCE), and non-hypothetical best worst scaling (NHBWS). The results indicate that accounting for ANA information significantly improves the goodness-of-fit of the estimated choice models, especially when full ranking information (NHROCE and NHBWS) is used. In terms of marginal WTP estimates, the results show that modeling ANA, independently of the elicitation approach of ANA (ST or CT), significantly influences consumers’ WTP values. However, the results suggest that incorporating ANA information does not substantially enhance the predictive power of the estimated choice model.

The Biden Administration significantly raised its Social Cost of Carbon because of revised predictions that increased global crop yield losses under a changing climate. Although previous studies have estimated and predicted the impact of climate on crop yield distributions—highlighting differences in conditional moments or distributions (given climate)—no one has yet explored whether a changing climate has structurally altered marginal crop yield distributions, particularly with regard to tail probabilities, in a statistically significant way. To that end, we apply a new test for the presence of distributional structural change to U.S. county-level crop yields for corn and soybean. We then investigate the extent to which the spatio-temporal variation in the structural change results is explained by the spatio-temporal variation in climate change measures. Interestingly, we find that the climate change measures are jointly statistically significant and explain a notable extent of the variation despite mitigating factors like on-farm adaptation efforts and measurement error. Our results are consistent across different structural change measures, different regions of the marginal yield distribution, various methods to account for technological change in mean yields, and correcting or not for temporal changes in variance. Importantly, our results statistically justify current approaches that consider the effect of climate on the entire distribution rather than those that only consider the trend and variance.

This paper evaluates the impact of three interventions (seed trial packs, consumption-oriented interventions, and agricultural training, either individually or bundled) in improving varietal turnover in northern Nigeria via a 3-year cluster-randomized controlled trial. A secondary objective of the paper is to evaluate the performance of these varieties in farmers’ fields. Results show that seed trial packs increased adoption of promoted varieties by 42%–44% of farmers and 42%–47% of maize and cowpea land area. Farmers rated production, processing, marketing, and consumption characteristics of these varieties very highly. Yields on plots with promoted varieties were significantly higher than those of farmers’ traditional varieties, ranging from 16% to 25% more for maize and 70% for cowpea in the first season, with observed yields persisting in the second season.