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Globally, over 800 million people are food insecure. Current methods for identifying food insecurity crises are not based on statistical models and fail to systematically incorporate readily available data on prices, weather, and demographics. As a result, policymakers cannot rapidly identify food insecure populations. These problems delay responses to mitigate hunger. We develop a replicable, near real-time model incorporating spatially and temporally granular market data, remotely-sensed rainfall and geographic data, and demographic characteristics. We train the model on 2010–2011 data from Malawi and forecast 2013 food security. Our model correctly identifies the food security status of 83 to 99% of the most food insecure village clusters in 2013, depending on the food security measure, while the prevailing approach correctly identifies between 0 and 10%. Our results show the power of modeling food insecurity to provide early warning and suggest model-driven approaches could dramatically improve food insecurity crisis response.

We estimate the impact of an asset transfer program on household resilience. We measure resilience as the probability that a household will sustain at least the threshold asset level required to support consumption above the poverty line. Using six rounds of data collected over 42 months in rural Zambia, we construct a measure of resilience based on households' conditional welfare distributions to estimate program impacts. We find that the program increased household resilience; beneficiaries' likelihood of being non-poor in future periods increased by 44%. The program both increased mean assets and decreased variance, signaling an upward shift in households’ conditional asset distributions. Our method demonstrates the added value of the resilience estimation compared with a conventional impact assessment; numerous households classified as non-poor are unlikely to remain non-poor over time and the relationship between wealth and resilience is driven by changes in both the conditional mean and the conditional variance.

Agricultural extension services can play an important role in increasing farmer yields and incomes yet evidence of the effectiveness of extension services in Sub-Saharan Africa has been mixed. We study farmers learning about agricultural technologies using a (quasi) randomized controlled trial in which farmers differ in their exposure to commonly used extension methods that range in their intensity of interaction. We find that farmers who participated in season-long farmer-led demonstration plot cultivation learn about the critical adoption details of production processes and adopt more components of a new, multi-component technology. Farmers invited to attend farmer field day events learn considerably less about production process details. Building on qualitative interviews, we then develop a two-stage learning process in which farmers first form yield expectations and then choose how much to invest in learning the details of the production processes subject to yield beliefs and the learning costs. We test this model using detailed data on beliefs, knowledge, adoption and constraints and find evidence that farmers yield beliefs hinge around observed yield, and these observed yields affect learning efforts.

Fertilizer use remains below recommended rates in most of Sub-Saharan Africa, contributing to low crop yields and poverty. We explore the role of fertilizer quality. We interviewed fertilizer sellers in an important agricultural region in Tanzania and sampled their fertilizer to establish that the nutrient content of fertilizers is good, meeting industry standards. However, we find farmers’ beliefs to be inconsistent with this reality. Beliefs about adulteration push down farmer willingness-to-pay for fertilizer; with farmers willing to pay more if quality is verified. In addition, we find some evidence of a quality inference problem: many fertilizers have degraded appearance, and farmers appear to rely on these observable attributes to (incorrectly) assess unobservable nutrient content. Market prices reflect neither nutrient content nor degradation in appearance, even in competitive markets. Our results suggest the existence of an equilibrium where farmer beliefs about fertilizer are inconsistent with the truth, and seller incentives to invest to alter beliefs are limited, motivating future research into the origins and persistence of such an equilibrium.

Low investment in profitable technologies contributes to persistent poverty. Many farmers in developing countries invest too little in fertilizer despite evidence that fertilizer is profitable. This field experiment investigates a two-part explanation: (1) farmers are reluctant to invest without farm-specific evidence of profitability, possibly because of heterogeneous returns, and (2) information is not sufficient to increase investment because of financing constraints. Farmers in one arm of the experiment receive fertilizer recommendations based on tests of their soils, others receive recommendations paired with an input subsidy, and others receive only the input subsidy. Only farmers who receive recommendations and the subsidy increase fertilizer application and yields relative to the control group. The financing constraint may explain limited response to heterogeneous fertilizer recommendations. The approximate net benefit of increased yields, accounting for the full cost of inputs and soil tests, is equivalent to average wages for seven days of work.

We study whether Honduran municipalities exposed to a conditional cash transfer program from 2000 to 2005 experience lasting effects on human capital and labor market outcomes. The government randomly assigned three forms of delivering program benefits across targeted municipalities: demand (vouchers), supply (clinic and school subsidies), and a combination of both. This program provides an opportunity to explore if and how differential exposure to incentives produces longer term effects. Using municipal-level panel data, these effects are estimated using difference-in-differences. We find that the form of delivering cash transfers influences the degree to which these programs make progress towards their objective of reducing future poverty. Compared to municipalities receiving support from the Honduran Poverty Reduction Strategy, our study indicates that exposure to demand-side incentives individually has no lasting impact. However, joint exposure to both demand- and supply-side incentives does lead to measurable improvements in schooling and labor market participation.

Summary This paper uses hedonic analysis to estimate the impact of an area-based anti-poverty project on land values in a developing country. Economic theory would suggest that benefits of area-based programs would be capitalized into land prices, as supply is relatively fixed compared to other factors of production. While revealed preference methods have been applied widely in the field of environmental economics, they have not yet been used to evaluate an international development project. We study the effects of The Millennium Villages Project (MVP) in Sauri, Kenya. Using administrative data from the Kenyan government on prices for land bought and sold within the MVP (established in 2005) and for land bought and sold in the surrounding area during 1999–2013, we estimate the project’s effect on local land prices. We find no evidence that the MVP investments led to an increase in land prices within project areas. This research represents the first work to use hedonic analysis of land values to assess an international development project.

Farmer groups are the cornerstone of many agricultural projects in low income countries. The success of such projects crucially depends on the ability of group members to cooperate. We conducted a series of public goods experiments to study within-group cooperation in Malawian farmer groups. We combine results from these experiments with survey data and qualitative interviews. Our results shed light on the heterogeneous capacity of groups to cooperate. We find that democratically run groups, in particular those with close social ties, are more cooperative compared to groups with leader-driven decision-making. Focus groups indicate that this democracy is deliberative in nature, characterized by open discussion that aggregates preferences, increases common knowledge, and creates goodwill. A second set of experiments in which we experimentally vary the decision-making processes yields quantitatively similar results in arbitrary groupings of farmers and null results in pre-existing groups with established decision-making procedures, demonstrating the stickiness of institutional rules. Our results imply that group formation and functioning needs to be included in the design phase of agricultural projects in low income countries.

This research analyzes the motivations and dynamics of small farmer participation in supermarket supply chains in developing countries: why some small farmers join these new markets and continue their participation; why others drop out or decline the relationship from the outset. Drawing on insights from the technology-adoption literature on learning and experimentation, and also on findings from a simple two-period Bayesian model of farmer decisions to participate in a new market, we incorporate measures of neighboring farmers’ experience into the decision model. Results suggest that farmers delay entry to observe their neighbors’ outcomes; we find a negative relationship between the number of neighbor participants in a given period and a farmer’s own decision to enter the supply chain. We find evidence that farmers delay entry for strategic reasons, allowing neighbors to bear the costs associated with a first wave of adjustment to the market, including higher product rejection rates and lower initial annual transactions with supermarkets, compared to revenues from marketing in the traditional way. Results are robust to definitions of neighbors using both administrative and geographic designations. Our results raise questions about the optimal sequence and level of farmers' market participation and exit, which remain largely unexplored in the literature.

This paper identifies and describes the recent emergence of a new class of private sector intermediaries in fresh fruit and vegetable (FFV) supermarket supply chains in China. These intermediaries play key roles that determine the ways in which farm households participate in and the benefits they derive from new retail-led market opportunities associated with the supermarket sector's shift from FFV procurement through wholesale markets towards more direct contracting with farm communities. This paper provides a comprehensive description of 198 FFV supply chain intermediaries working with Walmart China in 2014, including their historical background, infrastructure investments, downstream marketing and upstream sourcing. We find that these actors play an increasingly critical role in the organization of land, labor and production through contracts. Our study provides critical insights for understanding both the trends in vertical coordination of China's developing agricultural sector and the pace of the country's agricultural modernization. Walmart is a leading international supermarket chain with a growing presence in China, and evidence suggests that their supply chain strategies are similar to other large supermarkets in the region. Results are also relevant to understanding current challenges in China related to food safety and quality, a top priority in recent years.

Crop revenues vary greatly among farmers and the source of that variation is not fully understood, even after controlling for factors including input use, technology adoption, and other agro-climatic factors. One hypothesis that may explain the variation in outcomes among farmers is differential access to information through peers. Using a household survey from India containing detailed information about personal relationships, we estimate peer effects on cash crop revenue using a novel spatial econometric technique to control for reflection. Our results show that 60% of farmers’ revenue is explained by peers. Peer effects are particularly large in pesticide use and in the cultivation of a new crop. However, peer effects in input expenditures and land allocation cannot fully explain the variation in revenue, implying peers may also associate with management, negotiation, and marketing. We find that peer effects are significant among farmers’ self-reported peers, especially among those peers who are farmers’ main advisors for agricultural matters. Although caste-based networks (both within the same and in adjacent villages) are important, their effect is smaller than that of self-reported peer networks. We empirically rule out that our effects are driven by other factors such as geographically correlated unobservables, farmers following a lead farmer or economies of scale. Our findings speak to both the potential and the limitations of peers as sources of agricultural information, and highlight the need for future research about how to best integrate peers into agricultural extension.

Globally, over 800 million people are food insecure. Current methods for identifying food insecurity crises are not based on statistical models and fail to systematically incorporate readily available data on prices, weather, and demographics. As a result, policymakers cannot rapidly identify food insecure populations, hampering responses to mitigate hunger. We develop a replicable, near real-time model incorporating spatially and temporally granular market data, remotely-sensed rainfall and geographic data, and demographic characteristics. We train the model on 2010-2011 data from Malawi and forecast 2013 food security. Our model correctly identifies the food security status of 77% of the most food insecure village clusters in 2013 while the prevailing approach fails to correctly classify any of these village clusters. Our results show the power of modeling food insecurity to provide early warning and suggest model-driven approaches could dramatically improve food insecurity responses.

This paper studies the effects of a multifaceted asset transfer programme on the decision-making dynamics of smallholder households. Constructing separate indexes of participation in household decision-making for adult females and males, and using difference-in-differences to assess the impact of livestock transfer and training, we find evidence that these interventions increased the share of decisions in which individuals participated, regardless of gender. Increases in decision-making participation by both men and women are driven by an increase in joint decision-making within the household on the extensive margin. Decisions made jointly by men and women increased by 16 per cent across all household activities, with statistically significant declines in independent decision-making by men and women. Findings are encouraging given the evidence of welfare gains associated both with increases in participation in decision-making by women as well as increased cooperation within households.

We study whether Honduran children exposed to a conditional cash transfer program from 2000-2005 experience lasting effects on human capital and labor market outcomes in early adulthood. The government randomly assigned three forms of delivering program benefits across targeted municipalities: demand (vouchers), supply (clinic and school subsidies), and a combination of both. This program provides an opportunity to explore if and how differential exposure to incentives produces longer term effects. Using municipal-level panel data, these effects are estimated using difference-in-differences. We find that the form of delivering cash transfers influences the degree to which these programs make progress towards their objective of reducing future poverty. Compared to municipalities receiving support from the Honduran Poverty Reduction Strategy, our study indicates that exposure to demand-side incentives in- dividually has no lasting impact. However, joint exposure to both demand- and supply-side incentives does lead to measurable improvements in schooling and labor market participation.

Though problems related to low and declining soil fertility continue to impede agricultural production and food security in Sub-Saharan Africa, smallholder farmers in this region – those cultivating two hectares or less – have shown reluctance to adopt practices at scale that help conserve or enhance soil quality. Employing a discrete choice-based experiment, we find evidence that farmers’ propensity to adopt soil fertility management (SFM) practices increases with improved access to mineral fertilizers, and when farmers receive relevant technical training on soil fertility improving technologies. A unique aspect of our study is our focus on understanding how smallholders’ stated SFM preferences relate to their perceptions of recent local climatic variation. We find that farmers who perceive that rainfall amounts are decreasing are less willing to adopt crop rotations to improve soils. Our findings suggest that policies designed to increase adoption of SFM practices are more likely to succeed when they provide farmers with inputs that farmers perceive as complementary to SFM, including mineral fertilizer, and when they are built around an understanding of farmers’ perceptions of climatic variability.

How are poverty analyses and poverty traps assessments affected by the choice among conventional methods of asset index construction? To address this question, this article uses panel data from fou...

Despite more than a decade of NGO and government activities promoting developing world farmer participation in high-value agricultural markets, evidence regarding the household welfare effects of such initiatives is limited. This article analyzes the geographic placement of supermarket supply chains in Nicaragua between 2000 and 2008 and uses a difference-in-differences specification on measures of supplier and nonsupplier assets to estimate the welfare effects of small farmer participation. Though results indicate that selling to supermarkets increases household productive asset holdings, they also suggest that only farmers with advantageous endowments of geography and water are likely to participate. Copyright 2013, Oxford University Press.

This paper uses the Market Information and Food Insecurity Response Analysis Framework to analyze data on food market intermediation and on consumer behavior and preferences in order to clarify whether market-based cash and voucher programs are likely to prove effective for addressing food insecurity in rural and urban study sites in Kenya. The findings carry important implications for food security interventions by government and operational agencies. We confirm that context matters when undertaking a response analysis. While we find that cash and/or vouchers are appropriate in both urban and rural locations, markets in surveyed urban settlements can respond better to a large injection of cash or vouchers than can surveyed rural areas. Moreover, household vulnerabilities are associated with household preferences in different ways across the two sites. In rural areas, female headed households and households reporting a physical limit to market access were among the groups that strongly preferred food aid to cash or vouchers while households with these characteristics in urban areas preferred the flexibility of cash or vouchers to food.

Summary Supermarkets, specialized wholesalers, processors, and agro-exporters are transforming the marketing channels into which smallholder farmers sell produce in low-income economies. We develop a conceptual framework with which to study contracting between smallholders and a commodity-processing firm. We then synthesize results from empirical studies of contract farming arrangements in five countries (Ghana, India, Madagascar, Mozambique, and Nicaragua). The resulting meta-narrative documents patterns of participation, the welfare gains associated with participation, reasons for nonparticipation, the significant extent of contract noncompliance, and the considerable dynamism of these value chains as farmers and firms enter and exit frequently.

This article argues for research and policy emphasis on two often-ignored factors critical to increasing regional agricultural productivity in Sub-Saharan Africa: the presence of agronomically and ...

This paper uses data on food market intermediation and on consumer behavior and preferences to clarify whether market-based cash and voucher programs are likely to prove effective for addressing food insecurity in rural and urban study sites in Kenya. The findings carry important implications for food security interventions by government and operational agencies. We find that context matters when undertaking a response analysis. Markets in surveyed urban settlements can respond better to a much larger injection of cash or vouchers than the surveyed rural areas can. Moreover, household vulnerabilities are associated with household preferences in different ways across the two sites. In rural areas, female headed households and households reporting a physical limit to market access strongly preferred food aid to cash or vouchers while in urban areas, households with these characteristics preferred the flexibility of cash or vouchers to food.

In Nicaragua and elsewhere in Central America, small-scale farmers are weighing the risks of entering into contracts with supermarket chains. We use unique data on negotiated prices from Nicaraguan farm cooperatives supplying supermarkets to study the impact of supply agreements on producers’ mean output prices and price stability. We find that prices paid by the domestic retail chain approximate the traditional market in mean and variance. In contrast, we find that mean prices paid by Wal-mart are significantly lower than the traditional market but that Wal-Mart systematically reduces price volatility compared with the traditional market. We find some evidence, however, that farmers may be paying too much for this contractual insurance against price variation.