Avocado is a non-traditional export crop of economic importance in Kenya. Commercialization of the fruit through contract farming is a viable alternative for improving the welfare of majority of smallholder farmers involved in its production. This paper explores factors influencing the participation of smallholder farmers in avocado contract farming and decomposes those contributing to differentials in quality and quantities of fruit harvested and sold by contract and non-contract farmers.

In recent decades, the literature on ecosystem services has pointed to the need to quantify and characterise Soil Natural Capital (SNC) under different types of land use and cover. This points to the need of understanding the SNC processes which define the provision of ecosystem services, as well as their changes through anthropogenic time. Tropical regions are subjected to a high rate of land use transformation which may change the properties of the soil, and consequently the potential provision of ecosystem services.

Garrett R., Rueda X. (2019) Telecoupling and Consumption in Agri-Food Systems. In: Friis C., Nielsen J. (eds) Telecoupling. Palgrave Studies in Natural Resource Management. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham

We study post-harvest decisions among Tanzanian rice farmers. Risk and time preference experiments are used to understand post-harvest decisions. In particular, we investigate storage and processing decisions, which according to our study can increase income by more than 50 per cent, but also introduce risk and time delays. Experimentally elicited risk and time preferences are statistically significant in explaining these post-harvest decisions. Impatient farmers are less likely to store paddy, and risk-averse farmers are less likely both to process and store paddy for future sales.

Climate change has compounded the uncertainties inherent in agriculture. Farmers have to make decisions faced with increasingly fluctuating weather, leaving them vulnerable. Access to climate-related information in developing countries, incidentally also the hardest hit by the adverse effects of climate change, is very limited. Given a choice set of technologies that yield different payoffs depending on seasonal weather outcomes, ambiguity arising from imprecise weather information may lead to sub-optimal choices.