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

We develop an analytical framework to examine an agency's optimal grassland easement acquisition while accounting for landowners’ optimal decisions under uncertainty in both conversion and conservation returns. We derive the value of “wait and see” (i.e., neither convert nor ease grassland) for landowners and find that grassland-to-cropland conversion probability and easement value vary in opposing directions when “wait and see” is preferred, indicating that a larger conversion probability does not necessarily imply a higher easement value. Our analysis shows that when conservation funds can be flexibly allocated across periods then the agency's optimal acquisition can be readily achieved by sorting land tracts according to their owners’ optimal choices. When funds cannot be flexibly allocated across periods, we examine both a rational agency's and a myopic agency's decision problems. An acquisition index is developed to facilitate optimal easement acquisition.

Agriculture is an important source of food, employment, and tax revenue to society. However, agricultural expansion is an important driver of global natural ecosystem degradation, including wetlands. Economic theory shows that wetland loss is caused by a mismatch between the private wetland conservation costs borne by landowners and the public benefits generated. We develop a spatially explicit wetland management model to estimate the private economic benefit of wetland drainage in an agricultural landscape in Alberta, Canada. We estimate a full wetland supply curve and show that the private economic benefits of wetland drainage are highly heterogeneous within a watershed. We then combine these private costs of wetland conservation with non-monetary measures of public ecosystem benefits to assess four wetland conservation policy targeting scenarios. We find a positive correlation between the opportunity cost of wetland conservation on private landowners and the amount of environmental benefits wetlands offer, suggesting that conserving the wetlands that impose the lowest opportunity cost may not be optimal targets for wetland conservation policy. We contribute to wetland conservation economics by demonstrating that targeted wetland conservation policies can be more effective than a uniform conservation policy that assumes wetlands within agricultural landscapes have the same costs and benefits.

Wheat markets stand out among other major crop commodity markets because pricing at the first point of exchange—typically a grain handling facility—is differentiated on specific quality characteristics. Moreover, the premiums and discounts that elevators offer to obtain grain of specific quality can be significant. The relative importance of quality premiums and discounts to farm-level production and marketing decisions demonstrate a need to quantitatively measure and explain factors that affect elevators' wheat-quality pricing decisions. This study develops an informed expectation model of elevators' quality-based pricing strategies and empirically estimates the model from a lengthy dataset of weekly price observations. I find empirical evidence that elevators use linear pricing schedules, but more aggressively discount wheat with protein levels lower than a baseline than reward higher-protein wheat. The results also indicate that weather characteristics, futures contract price indicators, and USDA Crop Progress reports are contributors to predicting the new crop protein premiums and discounts, and that out-of-sample accuracy for predicting how grain elevators will value wheat protein ranges between 70% and 80%.

We explore the information content of dockside prices and fishing costs in the estimation of stock abundance. Our approach is two-pronged: we first examine whether the implied biomass, that is, the biomass that is consistent with a simple microeconomic model calibrated with observed prices and costs, offers an approximation of actual stock assessments—both agree over the first 20 years of observation, but diverge over the last five. In a second approach, we use annual data in Vector Autoregressive (VAR), Bayesian VAR (B-VAR), and Vector Error Correction (VEC) frameworks and add monthly data in a mixed-frequency data analysis including Mixed-Frequency Bayesian VAR (MF-BVAR) and Mixed-Data Sampling (MIDAS) frameworks for log-differenced time series. Parameter uncertainties are addressed through Bayesian regression and forecasting methods. We find a statistically significant correlation between biometric estimates and changes in a price-based indicator that is robust to the inclusion of confounding factors. We conclude that the combination of price data and per-trip landings, when interpreted with care, can serve as a complementary, but comparatively affordable and timely, source of information for stock assessments.

This article examines the effect of price hedging on publicly subsidized insurance. Theoretically, the effect of hedging is found to have an ambiguous effect on the incentive to purchase revenue insurance. A simulation is used to analyze the relationship between hedging and the Canadian AgriStability program in three regions in Saskatchewan. AgriStability is a margin insurance product, though in the simulation I hold input use constant, allowing the program to operate as if it were revenue insurance. Hedging is found to substantially reduce enrolment in AgriStability in each region. Furthermore, in some simulations the benefits that producers receive from AgriStability are smaller than the value of government subsidies. The results offer an explanation for low participation in AgriStability and show that the risk-reducing effect of AgriStability is moderated by the ability of crop producers to hedge price risk through other means.

Using detailed survey data on broiler growers, we tested for the existence of hold-up problems in the broiler industry in Jiangsu Province, China. We found that growers’ investments in chicken houses, which are assets with a high degree of physical and location specificity, increased along with the number of potential buyers (integrators) nearby. Such an effect was particularly strong in proximity to leading industry buyers. These results support the existence of hold-ups in the Chinese broiler industry. However, we failed to find evidence that a longer-term contract led to higher grower investments in chicken houses, possibly because of the lack of a minimum purchase guarantee in a typical contract. A key policy implication of this study is that subsidies to growers, from the government or buyers, can alleviate the underinvestment problem caused by hold-ups.

The production of biofuels is limited in Canada, but the availability of wheat straw as a second-generation (i.e., cellulosic) feedstock is an exciting prospect for the future development of a biofuel industry. The future success of such a biofuel industry will depend on future ethanol prices and prices related to wheat straw. These prices are likely to be influenced by markets related to the existing first-generation ethanol industry in the United States. Therefore, the motivation of this paper is to investigate relationships between Canadian wheat prices and US corn, ethanol, and gasoline prices. We employ a DCC-MGARCH enhanced VEC model to investigate time-varying relationships among these markets. Results indicate that there are positive relationships between wheat and corn, ethanol and corn, and wheat and ethanol markets. Our results add to a better understanding of the level of integration between select Canadian agricultural markets and US energy markets. More specifically, the price relationships identified highlight several sources of price risk that may affect the financial success of commercially producing second-generation ethanol from wheat straw in Canada. This information will be of particular interest to prospective industry investors and policymakers.

The objective of this study is to analyze the impact of research and development (R&D) investment on the export performance of Canadian agrifood small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and on that of related sectors, namely, the textile and clothing sector and the manufacture of leather goods and similar products. First, we analyzed explanatory factors for R&D expenses, and then, we analyzed the impact of R&D on extensive (market access) and intensive (trade value) margins of trade using a difference-in-differences approach. We used data obtained from the Statistics Canada's National Accounts Longitudinal Microdata File (NALMF) for 2010–2015 and the Trade by Exporter Characteristics (TEC) database. The size of firms and their support from the Canadian government affect their propensity to invest in R&D and the amount of R&D expenses and their intensity, measured as the ratio of R&D to sales of goods and services. Overall, our results show that investment in R&D has a positive impact on the export performance of agrifood SMEs; the impact is smaller when the destination is one of the states in the United States.

The adoption of improved crop varieties, such as drought-tolerant varieties, plays a crucial role in addressing climate change. In this study, we explore how and to what extent spatial interactions between farmers and neighboring farmers affect the adoption of drought-tolerant wheat varieties (DTWVs), using data collected from rural households in China. A spatial Durbin probit model is utilized to identify the spatial patterns in DTWVs adoption. Results show that spatial dependence exists in DTWVs adoption. Spatial dependence is positively associated with wheat farmers’ DTWVs adoption decisions, and the spatial effects mainly arise from the neighboring farmers’ adoption decisions and information spillover via smartphone use and extension service contacts. Further analysis reveals that DTWVs adoption improves farm performance by increasing both wheat yields and farm profits significantly. Our findings underscore the necessity of considering spatial interactions between farmers when designing and promoting innovative agricultural technologies in rural areas.

In contrast to April 2020 forecasts of the effects of the pandemic on Canada's agricultural trade, we find 1 year later that the recession was deeper, that total trade fell by less than was widely expected, and agricultural trade did not fall but actually increased. This was a general pattern across countries, but Canada's agricultural trade increased by at least 11%, more than the world aggregate and that of the U.S. This was mostly due to the success of crop exports, specifically in oilseeds, lentils, and cereals. Although some of the increase was due to rising commodity prices, for the most part trade volumes also increased substantially. Not only was Canada's export boom not expected but it was also not closely related to the pandemic. It was due to commodity-specific circumstances, such as China's rebuilding of its depleted hog herd, a short crop of lentils in India, and demand shifts to Canadian wheat, durum and barley. Increased Asian demand helped this export growth, but accounted for less than a third of it.