Canadian Journal of Agricultural Economics-Revue Canadienne D Agroeconomie最新文献

Technological advances—for example, from hand milking to robotic milking—are at the heart of economic transformation and have significantly shaped the agri-food industry and economic growth throughout history. A look at the lead article of the first issue (and the first volume, 1952) of the Canadian Journal of Agricultural Economics (CJAE) 70 years ago reveals an ongoing inquiry within the discipline about how technological progress has shaped how we manage our farms with the implications on aggregate industry productivity and food prices. The topics discussed along these lines in the first issue of the CJAE are still relevant today—for example, challenges with measuring productivity and innovation, diffusion of innovation, technological unemployment, demand for skilled workers, financing innovations, climate change and food security. Science, technology, and innovation for the 21st century hold the potential to foster resilient and sustainable intensification of farm production and productivity growth for the agri-food industry. In this address, I reflect on the past, present, and future impacts of technological innovations and productivity growth on the agri-food industry and discuss the implications for future research, welfare, and policy.

Most studies of agricultural transformation document the impact of agricultural income growth on macroeconomic indicators of development. Much less is known about the micro-scale changes within the farming sector that signal a transformation precipitated by agricultural income growth. This study provides a comparative analysis of the patterns of micro-level changes that occur among small-holder farmers in Uganda and Malawi in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), and Thailand and Vietnam in Southeast Asia (SEA). Our analysis provides several important insights on agricultural transformation in these two regions. First, agricultural income in all examined countries is vulnerable to changes in precipitation and temperature, an effect that is nonlinear and asymmetric. SSA countries are more vulnerable to these weather changes. Second, exogenous increases in agricultural income in previous years improve non-farm income and trigger a change in labor allocation within the rural sector in SEA. However, this is the opposite in SSA where the increase in agricultural income reduces non-farm income, indicating a substitution effect between farm and non-farm sectors. These findings reveal clear agricultural transformation driven by agricultural income in SEA but no similar evidence in SSA.

This paper uses a randomized survey instrument to study the impact of African Swine Fever (ASF) information on Chinese consumers’ preference for pork attributes and purchases during the recent peak of the ASF pandemic in 2019. We study consumers’ preference for pork attributes including brand, meat texture and taste, quality safety assurance, and traceability under different information treatments. Results show that the willingness to pay (WTP) for quality safety assurance is the highest, followed by brands and traceability systems, and the WTP is lowest for good taste. We show that providing detailed ASF information substantially changes consumer preference by altering the relative importance of pork attributes and price sensitivity, which enables consumers to focus more on safety-related attributes while paying less attention to price and taste attributes. Furthermore, we find that a higher belief in the future of ASF occurrence reduces the frequency of purchases marginally but does not significantly influence for amount per purchase and the total purchase amount.

This article estimates the U.S. state-level soybean export forecast until December 2024 using a seasonal autoregressive integrated moving average (SARIMA) model. We utilize the newly developed exchange-rate equity market volatility (EMV-EX) to improve model fit and the Dirichlet process mixture model (DPMM) to control for unobserved heterogeneity. Using monthly data from January 2004 to December 2020, the study shows that soybean exports for states without ports are underestimated at the expense of states with ports. The EMV-EX has a positive effect on soybean exports. The forecasts reveal no expected changes in the trends for soybean exports until December 2024. This study's results are useful to make and to implement more informed policy decisions for risk-mitigating strategies such as the market-facilitation program.

Chinese agriculture is experiencing a transition from smallholder farming to the emergence of commercial farms that are characterized by intensification and specialization in production, as well as commercialization and cooperation in management. It requires substantial capital to facilitate such a transition, but it is very difficult for farmers in China to access bank credit. One way that commercial farms have to overcome such handicap is by organizing themselves into cooperatives. To assess the effect of cooperatives on the credit accessibility of commercial farms, we have developed a theoretical model as well as an empirical study of commercial farms in Jiangsu Province based on data from a survey of 754 commercial farm owners. Instrumental variable (IV) methods and the Propensity Score Matching (PSM) method that control endogeneity problem are used in the analysis. The empirical results show that cooperatives have a significant positive impact on the credit access of commercial farms. Commercial farms participating in cooperatives may alleviated their credit constraints by about 17.3 percentage points and increase the average credit per capita by nearly 80,000 Yuan. Cooperatives improve the credit access of commercial farms by exerting strong market power and reputation effect based on its organizational advantages. A disaggregated analysis also reveals that small commercial farms tend to benefit more from cooperatives in improving credit access than large commercial farms.

This study estimates the willingness to pay (WTP) premiums for two novel traits available through genomic technologies in the dairy industry. Using a contingent valuation method to elicit WTP and the data from mail surveys collected from 486 Canadian dairy producers, we find a positive WTP premium for feed efficiency and a negative or zero WTP premium for reduced methane emissions. However, we observe positive valuations for reduced methane emissions if it is bundled with the feed efficiency trait. This finding suggests that the way private and public benefits of environmentally sustainable production alternatives are presented to livestock producers is critical, especially as the industry adapts to rising demand while holding an increasingly precarious position in environmental sustainability.

Business risk management (BRM) has been an important focus of Canadian agricultural policy in the New Millennium. Safety net payments received by farmers can alter their investment portfolio and lead to risk-balancing behavior in agriculture. Risk-balancing is an unintended consequence of the farm safety net program and has a direct implication for future growth and sustainability of farm business. Does risk-balancing exist in Ontario agriculture? This question is addressed in this paper using data for the hog sector in Ontario. While safety net programs were designed to address Business Risk (BR) for all farms, our empirical results indicate that CAIS/AgriStability payments reduced BR for small, medium, and large farms. The results from our fixed effect panel regression analysis demonstrate that there is a significant risk-balancing behavior among medium hog farms in Ontario. Our results also reveal that the presence of risk-balancing behavior in Ontario hog sector does not pose any problem for future growth of the hog sector or the long-term sustainability of the farm safety net program.

In emerging economies where small farms are the main source of food supply, it is costly for the government to monitor and control food safety and production impact on the environment. However, the online food market can potentially give farmers stronger incentives to supply safer and more eco-friendly products, as they can access a national market where consumers are interested in healthy food, and they can differentiate their products by providing production information using videos and pictures. This research uses the choice experiment method to elicit farmers’ preference for production practices and marketing channels in China where e-commerce and delivery businesses are fast-growing. Our main finding is that farmers perceive higher utility in selling safer and more eco-friendly products than conventional products when using e-commerce platforms, evidence of the online market's positive role in food safety enhancement. Our results also identify two types of farmers: traditional farmers and farmers open to the idea of online markets. Farmers who have higher education and live in villages with e-commerce service centers are more likely to be the latter.

This article aims to understand the impact of board gender diversity (BGD) on the firm's deviation from efficient risk-taking (DERT) along with the mediating effect of sustainability reporting and the moderating effect of CEO overconfidence. The sample consists of 77 South Asian agri-food firms over the period 2010–2019. To account for endogeneity and other statistical biases, we use a system GMM approach. The results show that there is a non-monotonic relationship between BGD and DERT. Consistent with critical mass theory, we find that at least three women on board (WOB) are required to reduce the firm's DERT. The findings of the study also reveal that the overconfident CEO may restrict the female directors to achieve the firm's efficient risk-taking. The evidence further suggests that sustainability reporting quality (SRQ) does not mediate the link between BGD and a firm's DERT. The robustness tests are performed based on alternative risk proxy and the likelihood of financial distress. Our results theoretically support stakeholder, critical mass, and agency perspective that South Asian capital markets should enhance the representation of WOB to mitigate agency conflicts and to improve long-term firm sustainability.