Download or read book Stimulating agricultural technology adoption Lessons from fertilizer use among Ugandan potato farmers written by Nazziwa-Nviiri, Lydia and published by Intl Food Policy Res Inst. This book was released on 2017-02-17 with total page 36 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the context of a growing population in an already densely populated area, agricultural yields will need to increase without putting additional stress on the environment. The adoption of modern inputs by smallholders is an important ingredient of agricultural transformation. In this study we explore plot-level, household-level, and institutional-level characteristics associated with agricultural technology adoption behavior among smallholder farmers. The aim is to uncover correlations that can guide the design of policies and incentives that are likely to increase adoption. We explicitly differentiate between fixed costs that are likely to affect the decision to use the technology and variable costs that are more relevant for the decision regarding use intensity. In addition, we examine how the importance of each of these characteristics differs with asset status. To do so, we use data from about 1,880 potato plots cultivated by 500 randomly selected potato growers in southwestern Uganda. We first categorize households into poorly endowed and well-endowed asset classes based on their access to productive assets. We then estimate double-hurdle models for take-up and use intensity of fertilizer for each group. The results show that the factors associated with the decision to use fertilizer are often different from those associated with the decision about how much fertilizer to use and that the characteristics correlated with fertilizer adoption differ between asset-poor and asset-rich farmers. For instance, asset-poor female-headed households are less likely to use fertilizer, but if they do, they use more of it than male-headed households. Our results also suggest fertilizer packaging and distribution are important factors in fertilizer adoption decisions due to their impact on costs related to both indivisibilities and uncertainty about the quality. We derive a range of policy recommendations.

Download or read book Farmers quality assessment of their crops and its impact on commercialization behavior A field experiment in Ethiopia written by Abate, Gashaw T. and published by Intl Food Policy Res Inst. This book was released on 2017-03-24 with total page 44 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Adoption of quality-enhancing technologies is often driven largely by farmers’ expected returns from these technologies. Without proper grades, standards, and certification systems, however, farmers may remain uncertain about the actual financial return associated with their quality-enhancing investments. This report summarizes the outcomes of a short video-based randomized training intervention on wheat quality measurement and collective marketing among 15,000 wheat farmers in Ethiopia. Our results suggest that the intervention led to significant changes in farmers’ commercialization behaviors—namely, it prompted farmers to adopt behaviors geared toward assessing their wheat’s quality using easily implementable test-weight measures, assessing the accuracy of the equipment used by buyers in their kebeles (scales, in particular), and contacting more than one buyer before concluding a sale. The training also led to improvements in share of output sold, price received, and collective marketing, albeit with important limitations. First, farmers who measured their wheat quality received a higher price, but only if their wheat was of higher quality. Second, farmers who found that their wheat was of higher quality were more reluctant to aggregate their wheat (that is, sell their products through local cooperatives) than those who found that their wheat was of lower quality. Lastly, the training intervention led to better use of fertilizer in the following season. Our discovery that a short training intervention can significantly change farmers’ marketing and production behavior should encourage the development of further interventions aimed at enhancing farmers’ adoption of improved technologies and commercialization.

Download or read book Changing gender roles in agriculture Evidence from 20 years of data in Ghana written by Lambrecht, Isabel and published by Intl Food Policy Res Inst. This book was released on 2017-03-17 with total page 40 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At a time when donors and governments are increasing efforts to mainstream gender in agriculture, it is critical to revisit long-standing wisdom about gender inequalities in agriculture to be able to more efficiently design and evaluate policy interventions. Many stylized facts about women in agriculture have been repeated for decades. Did nothing really change? Is some of this conventional wisdom simply maintained over time, or has it always been inaccurate? We use longitudinal data from Ghana to assess some of the facts and to evaluate whether gender patterns have changed over time. We focus on five main themes: land, cropping patterns, market participation, agricultural inputs, and employment. We add to the literature by showing new facts and evidence from more than 20 years. Results are varied and highlight the difficulty of making general statements about gender in agriculture.

Download or read book Prospects for the Myanmar rubber sector An analysis of the viability of smallholder production in Mon State written by Van Asselt, Joanna and published by Intl Food Policy Res Inst. This book was released on 2017-02-23 with total page 36 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As a result of recent political reforms, Myanmar has the opportunity to enact major policy changes to reinvigorate its agriculture sector. In this context, Myanmar’s rubber sector has the potential to become an even greater source of export earnings and rural household incomes, but there are major challenges related to low rubber productivity and poor rubber quality. Using data from the Mon State Rural Household Survey (MSRHS) conducted from May to June 2015, as well as qualitative data collected from rubber producer focus groups and other interviews with rubber producers, traders, and processors, this paper describes the cost structure of rubber production in Mon State. We then estimate smallholder production costs and the profitability of smallholder rubber production under various alternative yield and price scenarios. The results suggest that if the weaknesses hindering the profitability of the rubber sector are not addressed, the rubber sector will likely stagnate. Moreover, in the absence of a major increase in world prices (substantially above the 2000–2016 average), new rubber investments will not be profitable without major improvements in yield and quality. Further, increasing only yields or only quality, or only improving the institutional environment, will not result in positive returns on investment for smallholders; reforms are needed in all three areas. If these weaknesses are addressed, however, Myanmar’s new investments will be profitable and Myanmar could become an important rubber producer and exporter on the world stage.

Download or read book Existing data to measure African trade written by Mitaritonna, Cristina and published by Intl Food Policy Res Inst. This book was released on 2017-03-10 with total page 32 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One finds a broad consensus in the literature regarding the lack of good information on trade in Africa, particularly intraregional trade. This paper attempts to identify gaps and remedies in measuring and tracking trade in Africa. We review the major international and regional databases that track trade in Africa, identifying the gaps therein. We also review the studies that have attempted to track informal trade between African countries, and we look at the major ongoing initiatives to track such informal trade. It appears that both international and regional databases suffer from a lack of reporting or from faulty reporting of African trade statistics. Informal trade flows pose an ongoing problem when measuring intraregional trade, although actual border-monitoring initiatives ongoing in selected countries constitute an interesting option for their quantification. When no direct monitoring method is available, estimating gravity equations represents an alternative with which to measure the potential trade between two partner countries, giving us an estimate of missing trade. A final avenue consists of estimating unregistered trade via national accounts data by comparing consumption, production, and declared trade.

Download or read book Nutrition incentives in dairy contract farming in northern Senegal written by Bernard, Tanguy and published by Intl Food Policy Res Inst. This book was released on 2017-04-07 with total page 44 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Health-related incentives to reward effort or commitment are commonplace in many professional contracts throughout the world. Typically absent from small-scale agriculture in poor countries, such incentives may help overcome both health issues for remote rural families and supply issues for firms. Using a randomized control design, we investigate the impact of adding a micronutrient-fortified product in contracts between a Senegalese dairy processing factory and its seminomadic milk suppliers. Findings show significant increases in frequency of delivery but only limited impacts on total milk delivered. These impacts are time sensitive and limited mostly to households where women are more in control of milk contracts.

Download or read book The returns to empowerment in diversified rural household Evidence from Niger written by Wouterse, Fleur Stephanie and published by Intl Food Policy Res Inst. This book was released on 2017-02-23 with total page 32 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Niger is a landlocked Sahelian country, two-thirds of which is in the Sahara Desert. Although only one-eighth of the land considered arable, the overwhelming majority of Niger’s households is involved in rain-fed agriculture largely for subsistence. Given erratic rainfall and low soil fertility, most smallholders fail to produce enough food to meet household requirements. Income diversification is thus the norm among these rural households and different income-generating activities offer alternative pathways out of poverty for households as well as a mechanism for managing risk in an uncertain environment. Empowerment is likely to be an important factor affecting the ability of households to diversity their activity portfolio and may also affect activity-incomes and thereby household welfare. In this study, I use new household- and individual-level empowerment data from the Tahoua region of Niger and regression analysis to quantify the effects of a range of human capital measures including empowerment on the activity portfolio and activity incomes of rural households. My findings reveal that empowerment in particular plays an important role in enabling households to engage in mixed diversification strategy, which combines staple cropping with nonfarm activities and migration. This is a “last resort” strategy for households in lower landholding quintiles to ensure food security and complement an inadequate resource base. Controlling for activity choice, three empowerment indicators in particular—confidence, group membership, and tenure security—strongly and positively affect income from staple and cash cropping, which on average makes up about 90 percent of household income. In fact, empowerment is the only human capital variable that strongly and positively affects total household income, opening up interesting avenues for policy interventions aimed at augmenting a household’s noncognitive ability through, for example, leadership training or encouraging producer group membership—to increase incomes of the rural poor.

Download or read book How do agricultural development projects aim to empower women Insights from an analysis of project strategies written by Johnson, Nancy L. and published by Intl Food Policy Res Inst. This book was released on 2017-02-23 with total page 36 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Increasing numbers of development agencies and individual projects espouse objectives of women’s empowerment, yet there has been little systematic work on mechanisms by which interventions can enhance women’s empowerment. This gap exists because of the lack of consensus on indicators as well as the lack of attention paid to measuring the effects of different types of interventions on empowerment. This paper identifies the types of strategies employed by 13 agricultural development projects within the International Food Policy Research Institute’s Gender, Agriculture, and Assets Project Phase 2 (GAAP2) that have explicit objectives of empowering women. We distinguish between reach, benefit, and empowerment as objectives of agricultural development projects. Simply including women does not necessarily benefit them, and even activities that benefit do not necessarily empower. To identify strategies to empower women, we build on the domains included in the Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index (WEAI) and are working with the GAAP2 portfolio of projects to develop an empowerment metric that is applicable in the project setting (a project-level WEAI, or pro-WEAI). We have identified the following potential domains to be included in pro-WEAI: input into production decision making, control over resources, control over income, leadership, time, physical mobility, intrahousehold relationships, individual empowerment, reduction in gender-based violence, and decision making on nutrition. The GAAP2 projects address these domains through a wide variety of activities that can be grouped into four main types: (1) direct and indirect provision of goods and services; (2) forming or strengthening groups, organizations, or platforms and networks that involve women; (3) strengthening knowledge and capacity through agricultural extension, business and finance training, nutrition behavior change communication, and other training; and (4) changing gender norms through one-way awareness raising or two-way community conversations about gender issues and their implications. In general, projects with activities in more activity areas target more domains of empowerment, and most projects target a core set of six empowerment domains. With the exception of intrahousehold relationships, which is always targeted by activities designed to influence gender norms, projects target domains with different types of activities or combinations of activities. This setup suggests that there may be no one-to-one link between a specific activity and empowerment benefits, and that implementation modalities will determine whether and how an activity contributes to women’s empowerment. The effectiveness of these project strategies will be assessed using both quantitative and qualitative methods throughout the GAAP2 research project.

Download or read book Improving the targeting of fertilizer subsidy programs in Africa south of the Sahara Perspectives from the Ghanaian experience written by Houssou, Nazaire and published by Intl Food Policy Res Inst. This book was released on 2017-03-17 with total page 44 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This paper assesses whether fertilizer subsidy programs can be better targeted to resource-poor farmers using the case of Ghana and proxy means test approaches. Past fertilizer subsidy programs in the country have not been particularly targeted to the poor, even as targeting poor and smallholder farmers has become key in the program implementation guidelines. As a result, many poor farmers have not benefited from past programs. Our results show that targeting approaches based on proxy means tests that use the correlates of poverty to select beneficiary farmers can potentially improve the poverty outreach and costeffectiveness of Ghana’s fertilizer subsidy programs. Therefore, we propose that the proxy means test approach should be considered for implementing Ghana’s fertilizer subsidy programs, first in a pilot project involving a few communities, and later, if found successful, in a full-scale program.

Download or read book Participation learning and equity in education Can we have it all written by Delavallade, Clara and published by Intl Food Policy Res Inst. This book was released on 2017-03-30 with total page 48 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals have set a triple educational objective: improving access to, quality of, and gender equity in education. This study is the first to document the effectiveness of policies targeting all these objectives simultaneously. We examine the impact of a multifaceted educational program—delivered to 230 randomly selected primary schools in rural India—on students’ participation and performance. We also study the heterogeneity of this impact across gender and initial school performance, and its sustainability over two years. Although the program specifically targeted outof-school girls for enrollment, the learning component of the program targeted boys and girls equally. We find that the program reduced gender gaps in school retention and improved learning during the first year of implementation. However, targeting different educational goals (access, quality, and equity) did not yield sustained effects on school attendance or learning, nor did it bridge gender inequalities in school performance over the two-year period.

Download or read book Institutional versus noninstitutional credit to agricultural households in India Evidence on impact from a national farmers survey written by Kumar, Anjani and published by Intl Food Policy Res Inst. This book was released on 2017-03-02 with total page 36 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A goal of agricultural policy in India has been to reduce farmers’ dependence on informal credit. To that end, recent initiatives have been focused explicitly on rural areas and have had a positive impact on the flow of agricultural credit. But despite the significance of these initiatives in enhancing the flow of institutional credit to agriculture, the links between institutional credit and net farm income and consumption expenditures in India are not very well documented. Using a large national farm household–level dataset and instrumental variables two-stage least squares estimation methods, we investigate the impact of institutional farm credit on farm income and farm household consumption expenditures. Our findings show that in India, formal credit is indeed playing a critical role in increasing both the net farm income and per capita monthly household expenditures of Indian farm families. We also find that, in the presence of formal credit, social safety net programs such as the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) may have unintended consequences. In particular, MGNREGA reduces both net farm income and per capita monthly household consumption expenditures. In contrast, in the presence of formal credit, the Public Distribution System may increase both net farm income and per capita monthly household consumption expenditures.

Download or read book The European Union West Africa Economic Partnership Agreement written by Bouët, Antoine and published by Intl Food Policy Res Inst. This book was released on 2017-02-28 with total page 80 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Despite recent modifications, the Economic Partnership Agreement (EPA) between the European Union (EU) and West African (WA) countries is still being criticized for its potential detrimental effects on WA countries. This paper provides updated evidence on the impact of the EPA on these countries. A dynamic multicountry, multisector computable general equilibrium trade model with modeling of the dual-dual economy and with a consistent tariff aggregator is used to simulate a series of new scenarios that include updated information on the agreement. We also go beyond estimating macrolevel economic effects to analyze the impacts on poverty. The policy simulation results show that the implementation of the EPA between the EU and WA countries would have marginal but positive impacts on Burkina Faso and Côte d’Ivoire and negative impacts on Benin, Ghana, Nigeria, Senegal, and Togo. The impact on poverty indicators in Ghana and Nigeria would be marginal. From the perspective of WA countries, this study supports the view that recent EU concessions are not sufficient and that domestic fiscal reforms are needed in WA countries themselves.

Download or read book Chinese investment in Ghana s manufacturing sector written by Tang, Xiaoyang and published by Intl Food Policy Res Inst. This book was released on 2017-03-31 with total page 32 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This paper uses Ghana as a case study to illustrate the extent to which Chinese manufacturing firms are driving manufacturing in an African country. Through a combination of desktop and field research, the author finds that the total number of Chinese manufacturing investments in Ghana indeed increased during past decade, but quite a few projects have been abandoned or not implemented because of the unfavorable investment environment. Small and large manufacturing projects can be found in different sectors, such as plastics, steel, pharmaceuticals, and others. All of the manufacturing investments target local or regional markets, either taking advantage of local raw materials or seeing opportunities in a market with little competition. Transitioning from trading to manufacturing investment and clustering are identified as the main patterns by which Chinese investors establish themselves in Ghana. Chinese firms source simple raw materials from local suppliers but import industrial supplies from abroad. Learning from Chinese business models, a few local businessmen have started their own manufacturing projects, mostly in the plastics recycling sector, but a lack of capital appears to keep some local players from moving up the value chain. Ghana’s weak economy itself is limiting technology transfer and local linkages between Chinese firms and Ghanaians.

Download or read book Limitations of contract farming as a pro poor strategy The case of maize outgrower schemes in upper West Ghana written by Ragasa, Catherine and published by Intl Food Policy Res Inst. This book was released on 2017-03-30 with total page 54 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The focus in this paper is on two relatively large maize-based contract farming (CF) schemes with fixed input packages (Masara and Akate) and a number of smaller and more flexible CF schemes in a remote region in Ghana (Upper West). Results show that these schemes led to improved technology adoption and yield increases. In addition, a subset of maize farmers with high yield improvements due to CF participation had high gross margins. However, on average, yields were not high enough to compensate for higher input requirements and cost of capital. On average, households harvest 29–30 bags (100 kg each), or 2.9–3.0 metric tons, of maize per hectare, and the required repayment for fertilizer, seed, herbicide, and materials provided under the average CF scheme is 21–25 bags (50 kg each) per acre, or 2.6–3.0 tons per hectare, which leaves almost none for home consumption or for sale. Despite higher yields, the costs to produce 1 ton of maize under CF schemes remain high on average—higher than on maize farms without CF schemes, more than twice that of several countries in Africa, and more than seven times higher than that of major maize-exporting countries (the United States, Brazil, and Argentina). Sustainability of these CF schemes will depend on, from the firms’ perspective, minimizing the costs to run and monitor them, and from the farmers’ perspective, developing and promoting much-improved varieties and technologies that may lead to a jump in yields and gross margins to compensate for the high cost of credit.

Download or read book Forced gifts The burden of being a friend written by Bulte, Erwin and published by Intl Food Policy Res Inst. This book was released on 2017-03-09 with total page 40 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In many developing countries, gift expenses account for a substantial share of total household expenditures. As incomes rise, gift expenses are escalating in several developing countries. We develop a theoretical model to demonstrate how (unequal) income growth may trigger “gift competition” and drive up the financial burden associated with gift exchange. We use unique census-type panel data from rural China to test our model predictions and demonstrate that (1) the value of gifts responds to the average gift in the community, (2) the escalation of gift giving may have adverse welfare implications (especially for the poor), and (3) escalating gift expenses crowd out expenditures on other consumption items.

Download or read book Misreporting month of birth Implications for nutrition research written by Larsen, Anna Folke and published by Intl Food Policy Res Inst. This book was released on 2017-03-09 with total page 52 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Height-for-age z-scores (HAZs) and stunting status (HAZ<−2) are widely used to measure child nutrition and population health. However, accurate measurement of age is nontrivial in populations with low levels of literacy and numeracy, limited use of formal birth records, and weak cultural norms surrounding birthdays and calendar use. In this paper we use Demographic and Health Surveys data from 62 countries over the period 1990–2014 to describe two statistical artifacts indicative of misreporting of age. The first artifact consists of lower HAZs for children reported to be born earlier in each calendar year (resulting in implausibly large HAZ gaps between January- and December-born children), which is consistent with some degree of randomness in month of birth reporting. The second artifact consists of lower HAZs for children with a reported age just below a round age (and hence implausibly large HAZ gaps between children with reported ages just below and just above round ages), which is consistent with survey respondents rounding ages down more than they round ages up. Using simulations, we show how these forms of misreporting child age can replicate observed patterns in the data, and that they have small impacts on estimated rates of stunting but important implications for research that relies on birth timing to identify exposure to various risks, particularly seasonal shocks. Moreover, the misreporting we identify differs from conventional age-heaping concerns, implying that the metrics described above could constitute useful markers of measurement error in nutrition surveys. Future research should also investigate ways to reduce these errors.

Download or read book Smog in our brains Gender differences in the impact of exposure to air pollution on cognitive performance in China written by Chen, Xi and published by Intl Food Policy Res Inst. This book was released on 2017-03-11 with total page 43 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While there is a large body of literature on the negative health effects of air pollution, there is much less written about its effects on cognitive performance for the whole population. This paper studies the effects of contemporaneous and cumulative exposure to air pollution on cognitive performance based on a nationally representative survey in China. By merging a longitudinal sample at the individual level with local air-quality data according to the exact dates and counties of interviews, we find that contemporaneous and cumulative exposure to air pollution impedes both verbal and math scores of survey subjects. Interestingly, the negative effect is stronger for men than for women. Specifically, the gender difference is more salient among the old and less educated in both verbal and math tests.