Aflatoxins are poisons that occur naturally in the environment. They are produced mainly by the Aspergillus flavus and Aspergillus parasiticus fungi, which can affect many of important staple crops: maize, sorghum, millet, rice, oilseeds, spices, groundnuts, tree nuts, and cassava. Hot, humid,...

This paper evaluates farmers’ willingness to pay (WTP) for the vegetative propagated orange fleshed sweetpotato (OFSP) planting material that is many times considered as a public good. Famers’ WTP for OFSP vines was elicited by conducting a real choice experiment (RCE) among 121 small...

Off-farm work accounts for a substantial and growing share of household income among smallholder farmers in most of Sub-Saharan Africa, but evidence on the effects of these earnings on farm investments remains sparse. We use panel data from a sample of smallholder farmers in Kenya to estimate...

This research investigates the efficiency and equity impacts of the cropland rental market in rural Vietnam and attempts to identify the determinants and importance of transaction costs impeding this market. A generalised ordered logit model with shifting thresholds accounting for effects of...

This paper is a current draft of my Honours research project, and looks into whether changing economic variables have any predictive power on changing rural land use in recent years. To do this I attempt to answer three questions: 1. Do recent commodity prices have any predictive power on land...

Faster agricultural development requires understanding whether the inverse land size-yield relationship exists or not. To verify the presence of this relationship, this study decomposes a yield index into separate components attributable to (1) efficiency, (2) soil quality, (3) land size, (4)...

This paper examines off-farm labor supply effects of farm mechanization. The conceptual framework in the paper suggests positive effect of farm mechanization on farm operator’s off-farm labor supply. The paper uses adoption of tractor as proxy measure of farm mechanization and utilizes a...

This paper examines husband and wife perspectives on the division of authority over agriculture-related decision-making within households in Tanzania and Mali. We develop a theoretical model of intrahousehold “accord,” defined as the level of agreement between husbands and wives over who...