This paper quantifies the economic impacts of flooding in the Ba River and Penang River catchments in Viti Levu, Fiji. We conducted a detailed assessment of flood damage stemming from two major flooding events in 2012 that severely affected the two important catchments, primarily by using...

The adoption of improved varieties and technologies by rural agricultural households remains a major goal in development efforts. This is because researchers and development practitioners recognize it as a potential source of income growth for the poor. However, while studies on adoption of...

We introduce a fast and inexpensive method to rule out potential barriers to adopting a technology. We use this method to asses the role of exogeneous contract enforcement as a barrier to market for Kenya's French Bean export market. We survey 240 farmers in Kirinyaga County, Kenya who were...

During the Global Food Price Crisis of 2007-2011, millions of people suffered from hunger because food had become expensive. To cope with this problem, the governments of several countries decided to establish public food reserves in order to stabilize domestic prices. In this paper we develop a...

We empirically address the implications of biofuel policy regarding major grains, to the subsequent evolution of the markets for calories from the three major grains, maize, wheat and rice. The implied market variables, namely, market price, consumption, and stocks, using a structurally...

The Global Food Price Crisis of 2007-2011 had mixed effects on the poor in developing nations. By some estimates, the Crisis lifted nearly 24 million poor farmers out of poverty; however, it also cast 68 million net food buyers into poverty. In this paper, we analyze the distributional impacts...

Understanding how producers make decisions to allot acreage among crops and how decisions about land use are affected by changes in prices and their volatility is fundamental for predicting the supply of staple crops and, hence, assessing the global food supply situation. The innovations of the...