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Author: Takeshima, Hiroyuki
Publisher: Intl Food Policy Res Inst
ISBN:
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 36
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Book Description
Using results from the three rounds of Nepal Living Standard Surveys (conducted in 1995, 2003, and 2010), this study empirically assesses whether access to rented tractors or custom hiring services is a binding constraint on the income growth of farm households in Nepal. Because four-wheel tractors of medium horsepower are still the primary suppliers of these tractor services, access to these services can be restricted. First, we investigated the determinants of the adoption of hired tractors as well as the intensity of their use (measured by real annual expenditures on renting tractors). Results suggest that the adoption and the intensity patterns are generally consistent with the conventional theory of the demand for agricultural mechanization, indicating that the supply of these services may be relatively efficient in meeting the demand. However, adoption is still affected by the presence of tractor owners within the same village district committee, indicating that the proximity to tractor service providers may still partly determine accessibility. This second point was more formally tested using matching estimators within the Terai region of Nepal. It was found that, on average, the supply of tractor services might have evolved to a relatively efficient level in the Terai so that those who benefited from renting in tractors generally had access to such services. However, for at least certain segments of farm households in the Terai, insufficient access to tractor services was still a binding constraint on the growth of farm household incomes. The policy implications of these findings are briefly discussed in the last section.
Author: Takeshima, Hiroyuki
Publisher: Intl Food Policy Res Inst
ISBN:
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 36
Get Book Here
Book Description
Using results from the three rounds of Nepal Living Standard Surveys (conducted in 1995, 2003, and 2010), this study empirically assesses whether access to rented tractors or custom hiring services is a binding constraint on the income growth of farm households in Nepal. Because four-wheel tractors of medium horsepower are still the primary suppliers of these tractor services, access to these services can be restricted. First, we investigated the determinants of the adoption of hired tractors as well as the intensity of their use (measured by real annual expenditures on renting tractors). Results suggest that the adoption and the intensity patterns are generally consistent with the conventional theory of the demand for agricultural mechanization, indicating that the supply of these services may be relatively efficient in meeting the demand. However, adoption is still affected by the presence of tractor owners within the same village district committee, indicating that the proximity to tractor service providers may still partly determine accessibility. This second point was more formally tested using matching estimators within the Terai region of Nepal. It was found that, on average, the supply of tractor services might have evolved to a relatively efficient level in the Terai so that those who benefited from renting in tractors generally had access to such services. However, for at least certain segments of farm households in the Terai, insufficient access to tractor services was still a binding constraint on the growth of farm household incomes. The policy implications of these findings are briefly discussed in the last section.
Author: Ganesh Thapa
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 9813296488
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 652
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Book Description
This book addresses some key strategic questions related to agriculture in the context of major contemporary developments and emerging challenges in Nepal such as the changing role of agriculture with economic growth, structural transformation in reducing poverty, improving nutritional outcomes, and addressing the challenges of climate change. The book also suggests policy measures to improve the delivery of critical inputs and services and ensure the participation of marginal and smallholders in high-value chains. Further, it discusses how the new federal system and governance structure will affect the delivery of agricultural technology and services. The book is divided into five parts. Part I discusses macro-issues in the agriculture sector, while Part II focuses on agricultural productivity growth and its main drivers. The third part explores diversification in the agricultural and non-agricultural sectors by farmers and other rural people for livelihood improvement, while the fourth part deals with agricultural trade and marketing issues, highlighting policy implications and recommendations in the areas of immediate focus and further research. Lastly, Part V addresses institutions and governance issues, which are vital for agricultural development. In the final chapter, the editors summarize and synthesize the book’s main findings and develop a policy agenda for addressing the many challenges faced by the agriculture sector in Nepal, so as to make it more productive, competitive, sustainable, and inclusive. The book offers a rich source of analytical information on various aspects of agricultural development in Nepal and will be of immense value to policymakers, development partners, civil society, students, and those interested in the economic and agricultural development of not only Nepal, but also other developing countries.
Author: Kumar, Anjani
Publisher: Intl Food Policy Res Inst
ISBN:
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 36
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Book Description
Growing inequality has become an important concern in many countries. One of the ways that inequality is perpetuated is through differential market access across regions. This research deals with one of the primary determinants of regional inequality manifested in terms of market access. Nepal is one country where hierarchical geography leads to regional inequality. Differential market access can cause as well as accentuate inequality among farmers. Coordination arrangements such as contract farming can improve outcomes for the farmers and integrators on the one hand, but on the other hand it can accentuate inequality if only some regions benefit from it. With this background, in this paper we study the case of contract farming for exports with farmers in remote hilly areas of Nepal. The prospect for contract farming in such areas with accessibility issues owing to underdeveloped markets and lack of amenities is ambiguous. On the one hand, contractors in these areas find it difficult to build links, particularly when final consumers have quality and safety requirements. On the other hand, remoteness can make the contracts more sustainable if the agroecology offers product-specific quality advantages and, more important, if there is a lack of side-selling opportunities. At the same time, concerns remain about buyers’ monopsonistic powers when remotely located small farmers do not have outside options. This study hence quantifies the benefits of contract farming on remotely located farmers’ income and compliance with food safety measures. Results show that contract farming is significantly more profitable (offering a 58 percent greater net income) than independent production, the main pathway being higher price realization, along with training on practices and provision of quality seeds.
Author: Diao, Xinshen
Publisher: Intl Food Policy Res Inst
ISBN:
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 56
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Book Description
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 likely to influence farmer demand for mechanization in Africa and details different existing and potential mechanization supply models. Although an empirical analysis of mechanization demand and the effectiveness of supply chains is beyond the scope of this paper, in part due to data limitations, this paper suggests that demand for mechanization may be emerging in some parts of Africa. It also suggests that private-sector-driven supply models are better positioned to meet this demand than direct government involvement and certain types of subsidized programs. The paper then identifies possible areas for government support to complement private-sector leadership in developing mechanization supply chains. Nevertheless, significant further research is required to better understand the changing nature of mechanization demand in Africa and the extent and effectiveness of different supply models in meeting it.
Author: Saak, Alexander E.
Publisher: Intl Food Policy Res Inst
ISBN:
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 48
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Book Description
When an outbreak of an infectious disease is suspected, a local health agency may notify a state or federal agency and request additional resources to investigate and, if necessary, contain it. However, due to capacity constraints, state and federal health agencies may not be able to grant all such requests, which may give an incentive to local agencies to request help strategically. We study a model of detection and control of an infectious disease by local health agencies in the presence of imperfect information about the likelihood of an outbreak and limited diagnostic capacity. When diagnostic capacity is rationed based on reports of symptoms, the decision to report symptoms or not creates a trade-off. On the one hand, rigorous testing allows one to make an informed disease control decision. On the other hand, it also increases the probability that the disease will spread from an untested area where fewer precautionary measures are taken. Symptoms are overreported (respectively, reported truthfully, or underreported) when the cost of disease control is sufficiently small (respectively, in some intermediate range, or sufficiently large). If the disease incidence decreases or infectiousness increases, symptoms are reported less frequently. If the precision of private signals increases, the extent of overreporting of symptoms may increase. For different values of the parameters it can be socially optimal to subsidize or tax requests for additional investigations and confirmatory testing.
Author: Fishman, Ram
Publisher: Intl Food Policy Res Inst
ISBN:
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 28
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Book Description
The imbalanced application of chemical fertilizers in India is widely blamed for low yields, poor soil health, pollution of water resources, and large public expenditures on subsidies. To address the issue, the government of India is investing in a large-scale, expensive program of individualizedsoil testing and customized fertilizer recommendations, with the hope that scientific information will lead farmers to optimize the fertilizer mix. We conducted a randomized controlled trial in the Indian state of Bihar in what we believe to be the first evaluation of the effectiveness of the program as currently implemented. We found no evidence of any impact of soil testing and customized fertilizer recommendations on actual fertilizer use or the willingness to pay for lacking nutrients (elicited using aBecker-DeGroot-Marschak mechanism). Several factors could be driving these results, including a lack of understanding, lack of confidence in the information’s reliability, or the costs of the recommended fertilizer mixes. We provide evidence that suggestslack of confidence is the main factor inhibiting farmers’ response
Author: Quiñones, Esteban J.
Publisher: Intl Food Policy Res Inst
ISBN:
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 48
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Book Description
Conditional cash transfers(CCTs) are widely used antipoverty measuresin Latin America, and manysuch programs include indigenous beneficiaries.However, concerns have been raised that the indigenous poor,who have historically been marginalized,may not benefit from CCTsas much as the nonindigenouspopulation, owing to cultural as well as geographic factors. Even so, rigorous evidenceshowing this effect is limited. We assessedthis issue in the context of PROGRESA (Programa de Educación, Salud, y Alimenación), an integrated approach to poverty alleviation in Mexico, in which over one-thirdofbeneficiaries were indigenous at the program’s inceptionin 1998. A feature of the program’s initial targetingwasthat indigenous and nonindigenous beneficiaries were drawn from geographically similar areas, minimizing the potential for geographic factors to lead to differential impacts.Despite an extensive literatureshowing positive average impacts of PROGRESAon health and education outcomes, few studieshave disaggregatedthese effects by indigenous status. Using the randomized assignment of initial programrollout, we estimatedPROGRESA’simpactson a range of health and education indicators, distinctly for indigenous and nonindigenousbeneficiaries.We foundthat, as of November 2000, PROGRESA had significant impacts on many health and education indicators among both indigenous and nonindigenous households in our sample; in addition, in aggregateacross most indicators, these impacts werevery similar. Our results indicate thatif geographic disadvantage for indigenous households can be minimized(a nontrivial endeavor),cultural factors may not pose an intrinsic barrier to indigenous householdsbenefiting from CCTprograms, and as such, CCTs canpromote humancapital accumulation amongboth indigenous and nonindigenous households
Author: Bageant, Elizabeth
Publisher: Intl Food Policy Res Inst
ISBN:
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 40
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Book Description
Much policy and research attention has focused on the relationship between agriculture and nutrition. We extend this analysis to the context of Nepal’s decade-long civil conflict. Understanding how conflict or similar stress mitigates the agriculture-nutrition linkage is essential to developing impactful agriculture and nutrition policy in potential conflict zones. To our knowledge, there is no prior empirical work on the link between agriculture and nutrition in the context of conflict. We find a robust relationship between milk consumption and anthropometric outcomes. We also show a positive link between milk production and milk consumption at the household level. We find significant negative relationships between conflict and milk consumption for households owning few livestock while such relationships do not exist for larger holders. We attribute these heterogeneous effects to conflict-related productivity declines and milk price increases, both of which disproportionately affect households with fewer livestock and lower milk-production capacity. Among rural households in Nepal, milk production could serve as a nutritional buffer in times of conflict or other stress, and thus, policies that promote households’ livestock production could be effective measures in improving resilience of the rural poor against shocks that negatively affect child health outcomes.
Author: Wouterse, Fleur Stephanie
Publisher: Intl Food Policy Res Inst
ISBN:
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 28
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Book Description
Niger is a landlocked Sahelian country, two-thirds of which is in the Sahara desert, with only one-eighth of the land considered arable. Nevertheless, more than 90 percent of Niger’s labor force is employed in agriculture, which is predominantly subsistence oriented. Since the great famines of the 1970s and 1980s, the country has pursued agrarian intensification through technological change to address challenges to the food security situation. However, this approach has failed to recognize that the main characteristic of the Sahelian part of West Africa is the intricate complexity of the social, environmental, and economic dimensions that differentially affect male and female rural dwellers. One example is the patrilineal tenure system, which under increased population pressure has led to the exclusion of women and youth from agriculture in some areas. The Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index (WEAI) indicates that access to land is one important dimension of empowerment. In order to assess the role of empowerment in agricultural production, we use new household- and individual-level WEAI data from Niger and regression analysis. Our results show that empowerment is important for agricultural production and that households in which adult individuals are more empowered are more productive. This means that other and possibly more effective pathways to agrarian intensification exist and important agricultural productivity gains could be made by empowering men and women in rural households.
Author: Diao, Xinshen, ed.
Publisher: Intl Food Policy Res Inst
ISBN: 0896293807
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 548
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Book Description
Agricultural mechanization in Africa south of the Sahara — especially for small farms and businesses — requires a new paradigm to meet the needs of the continent’s evolving farming systems. Can Asia, with its recent success in adopting mechanization, offer a model for Africa? An Evolving Paradigm of Agricultural Mechanization Development analyzes the experiences of eight Asian and five African countries. The authors explore crucial government roles in boosting and supporting mechanization, from import policies to promotion policies to public good policies. Potential approaches presented to facilitating mechanization in Africa include prioritizing market-led hiring services, eliminating distortions, and developing appropriate technologies for the African context. The role of agricultural mechanization within overall agricultural and rural transformation strategies in Africa is also discussed. The book’s recommendations and insights should be useful to national policymakers and the development community, who can adapt this knowledge to local contexts and use it as a foundation for further research.
