The lack of efficient individual solutions for small farmers either in the market or through the State has resulted in a search for collective spaces to strengthen their productive capacities, where participation in organizations emerges as a relevant factor to obtain higher efficiency levels.
Economic development in low income settings is often associated with an expansion of higher-value agricultural activities. Since these activities often bring new risks, an understanding of cropland decisions and how these interact with shocks is valuable. This paper uses data from Mozambique to examine the effect of weather shocks on cropland decisions. We account for the bounded nature of land shares and estimate a Pooled Fractional Probit model for panel data. Our results show that crop choice is sensitive to past weather shocks.
Based on a framed field experiment, we investigate the trade-off between conservation and equity in the use of payments for environmental services (PES). We compare the effects of two PES schemes that implicitly incorporate different distributive justice principles: a flat-rate payment per biophysical unit conserved and a redistributive payment based on the Rawls maxi-min distributional principle. The main findings indicate that the introduction of a redistributive scheme can function as a multipurpose instrument.
In the developing world, collective land titling has become an important tool for recognizing the historical presence of ethnic communities and safeguarding their rights to occupy and manage their territories. However, little is known about the average impact of these titling processes on the well-being of these communities. In this paper we attempt to estimate the impact of collective land titling in territories inhabited by Afro-descendent communities in Colombia.
Promotion and supporting the adoption of land management and conservation technologies (LMCTs) among poor farming households has been considered to improve crop yields as well as production technical efficiency (TE). This article compares production efficiency between adopters and nonadopters of LMCTs in Tanzania. Using national panel data, the study applied stochastic frontier model to estimate the TE of adopters and nonadopters. The findings show that adopters of LMCTs had a relatively significantly higher TE (0.73) than their nonadopter counterparts (0.69).
Concerns about food insecurity have grown in Sub-Saharan Africa due to rapidly growing population and food price volatility. Post-harvest Losses (PHL) reduction has been identified as a key component to complement efforts to address food security challenges and improve farm incomes, especially for the rural poor.
