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Formal versus informal
Despite a growing dairy industry in India, farmers’ lack of access to organized markets and institutional credit remains one of the major hindrances in improving the scale and productivity of dairying. Using data from a survey of 612 households from the state of Punjab, India, this paper evaluates farmers’ choices of dairy value chains and their financing mechanisms. The study finds that 62 percent of the sample farmers representing 69 percent of the total milk sales are connected with formal value chains driven by cooperatives, multinational companies and private domestic processors. Small dairy farmers are associated more with informal value chains but they are not excluded from the fo...
Financing Agriculture Value Chains in India
This book examines the successful private, public and civil society models of agriculture value chains in India and addresses relevant challenges and opportunities to improve their efficiency and inclusiveness. It promotes the value-chain approach as a tool to improve access to finance for small holder farmers and discusses the possible structure of and regulatory framework for the ‘National Common Agricultural Market’— a term that featured in the Indian Finance Minister’s 2014–15 budget speech, and which is aimed towards standardizing and improving transparency in agricultural trade practices across states under a single licensing system. The book deliberates on the potential of d...
Rent Dispersion in the US Agricultural Insurance Industry
A central, but inadequately explored issue with respect to subsidized crop insurance programs concerns the costs of delivering insurance coverage to farmers. This study examines that issue in the context of the heavily subsidized US crop insurance program which has often been put forward as a model for agricultural insurance programs in other countries. US Government programs often rely on private firms to deliver income transfers or services, which then establish their own rent-seeking lobbies, which are shared with input suppliers. This rent dispersion process is examined in the context of the U.S. agricultural insurance industry, which receives as much as one third of the annual subsidies...
Long-term drivers of food and nutrition security
The 2015 Global Hunger Index suggests that despite progress in reducing hunger worldwide, hunger levels in 52 of 117 countries in the 2015 Global Hunger Index remain “serious” or “alarming.” Since achieving and maintaining food and nutrition security (FNS) remains a goal for all countries, it is important to understand the individual, national, and global factors that affect FNS. This paper proposes an analytical framework to identify and analyze the respective roles of key long-term drivers of FNS. We start by identifying what the key variables affecting FNS are at the household and country level, and then we continue by defining what the main exogenous or endogenous drivers affecti...
Understanding compliance in programs promoting conservation agriculture
Land degradation and soil erosion have emerged as serious challenges to smallholder farmers throughout southern Africa. To combat these challenges, conservation agriculture (CA) is widely promoted as a sustainable package of agricultural practices. Despite the many potential benefits of CA, however, adoption remains low. Yet relatively little is known about the decision-making process in choosing to adopt CA. This article attempts to fill this important knowledge gap by studying CA adoption in southern Malawi. Unlike what is implicitly assumed when these packages of practices are introduced, farmers view adoption as a series of independent decisions rather than a single decision. Yet the adoption decisions are not wholly independent. We find strong evidence of interrelated decisions, particularly among mulching crop residues and practicing zero tillage, suggesting that mulching residues and intercropping or rotating with legumes introduces a multiplier effect on the adoption of zero tillage.
International Conference on Digital Libraries (ICDL) 2013
ICDL conferences are recognized on of the most important platform in the world where noted expert share their experiences. Many DL experts have contributed thought provoking papers in ICDL 2013. These important papers are reviewed and conceptualized into ICDL on different areas of DL proceedings. The Proceedings have two volumes and has over 1100 pages.
Findings across agricultural public expenditure reviews in African countries
This paper examines whether the consensus reached by the late 2000s among African Union member countries and their external partners on the need to reverse the decades-long decline in spending for essential public goods and services in agriculture has begun to result inimproved levels and quality of national expenditure programs for the sector. It synthesizes evidence from 20 Agriculture Public Expenditure Reviews (Ag PERs) that have been carried out in countries in Africa South of the Saharan (Botswana, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Chad, Côte d’Ivoire, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ghana, Guinea, Liberia, Madagascar, Mozambique, Rwanda, Nigeria, Senegal, Sierra Leone, South Africa, Tanzan...
Agricultural mechanization and agricultural transformation
A renewed focus on agriculture’s potential contribution to economic transformation in Africa has resulted in increased attention paid to agricultural mechanization. African agriculture still relies predominantly on human muscle power despite anecdotal evidence on urbanization and rising rural wages, in contrast to other developing regions that have experienced rapid increases in agricultural mechanization during the past few decades. Past state-led mechanization pushes in Africa often failed due to insufficient understanding of the nature of demand for mechanization technologies among farmers and insufficient knowledge of private-sector functions. This background paper reviews the factors ...
Structural transformation and intertemporal evolution of real wages, machine use, and farm size–productivity relationships in Vietnam
This paper explores the evolution of real agricultural wages, machinery use, and the relationship between farm size and productivity in Vietnam during its dramatic structural transformation over the course of the 1990s and 2000s. Using six rounds of nationally representative household survey data, we find strong evidence that the inverse relationship between rice productivity and planting area attenuated significantly over this period and that the attenuation was most pronounced in areas with higher real wages. This pattern is also associated with sharp increases in machinery use, indicating a scale-biased substitution effect between machinery and labor. The results suggest that rural-factor market failures are receding in importance, making land concentration less of a cause of concern for aggregate food production.
Boserupian pressure and agricultural mechanization in modern Ghana
The adoption of machinery in agricultural production in Africa south of the Sahara has been far behind the level of mechanization found in Asia and Latin America. However, recent survey data have revealed high levels of machinery use in localized areas of cereal production in northern Ghana. A survey conducted by the International Food Policy Research Institute, in partnership with the Savannah Agriculture Research Institute, found that in some areas more than 80 percent of farmers were using machinery for at least one operation. This paper considers the theoretical drivers of agricultural intensification, as outlined by Boserup, Pingali, and Binswanger, and the extent to which they are able to explain the spatial variation in machinery use found in northern Ghana. Population pressure, market access, and agroecological conditions are considered key drivers that cause farmers to find ways to increase productivity and adopt new technologies. Combining survey data with geospatial datasets, the empirical analysis finds that population growth and travel time to the local urban center explain a significant and large proportion of the variation in machinery use by farmers.
