This paper presents an ex ante analysis of the private and social profitability of the introduction of Bt cotton for a major cotton producing area of northern Mozambique. Cotton is especially relevant to rural poverty reduction because smallholders often have few alternative cash earning...

Limited empirical evidence exists either to confirm or refute the hypotheses that food-safety standards confer a positive external effect on farmers adopting it. This article makes use of health indicators obtained from a random cross-section sample of 439 small-scale export farmers in Kenya to...

This paper presents an application of a two and three stages difference in differences model to measure environmental and economic impacts of Farmer Field School on crop and pest management practices of rice in Thailand. Panel data from 241 farm households were collected three times over a...

Vulnerability to poverty is a major problem in the rural areas of Sub Saharan Africa. Rural Households are confronted with various covariate and idiosyncratic shocks and are often severely constrained in coping with such events. They frequently resort to food from natural resources such as...

Producers in industrialized countries have been inundated by ideas and information about precision agriculture (PA) and how new site-specific management (SSM) technologies will revolutionize their farm operations. Conjuring up 'Star Wars' imagery, farmers and their computerized machinery...

When evaluating the impact of a program, the effects of interventions on program outcomes must be measured against a valid counterfactual case. Constructing a valid counterfactual is especially important when experimental data is not available. Building a baseline ensuring that treatment and...

Replaced with revised version of paper 07/29/09.

This paper examines the effects of compliance with developed country pesticide standards (DC-PS) on pesticide-related health costs and morbidity of developing country fresh vegetable growers. DC-PS require that farmers i) only use approved pesticides (usually less toxic to humans than ones used...

This paper assesses the impact of contract farming in the oil palm industry in Indonesia on smallholders’ well-being and investigates its implication for poverty reduction. Data were collected randomly from 245 smallholders in the province of Jambi, Sumatra. A treatment effects model was...