Meat has become a controversial topic in public debates, as it involves multiple sustainability dimensions. Here, we review global meat consumption trends and the various sustainability dimensions involved, including economic, social, environmental, health, and animal welfare issues. Meat has much larger environmental and climate footprints than plant-based foods and can also be associated with negative health effects. Technological options can help to increase the sustainability of meat production, but changes in consumption are required as well. At least in high-income countries, where people consume a lot of meat on average, notable reductions will be important. However, vegetarian lifestyles for all would not necessarily be the best option. Especially in low-income countries, nutritious plant-based foods are not available or affordable year-round. Also, livestock production is an important source of income for many poor households. More research is needed on how to promote technological and behavioral changes while managing sustainability trade-offs. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Resource Economics, Volume 14 is October 2022. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.

The digital revolution and the ongoing dissemination of mobile phones carry several prospects for smallholder farmers in sub-Saharan Africa. Food insecurity and low dietary quality remain major issues among African smallholders. Mobile phones could potentially facilitate access to food markets and thus improve food security and nutrition, but research on such types of effects remains scarce. In this study, we analyze whether mobile phones improve dietary quality among pastoral communities in Northern Kenya. We use six rounds of household panel data covering the period between 2009 and 2015. During this period, mobile phone ownership in the sample increased from less than 30% to more than 70%. Regression models with household fixed effects allow robust estimation while reducing potential issues of unobserved heterogeneity. The estimates show that mobile phone adoption and use are positively and significantly associated with dietary diversity. The effects are particularly large for frequent mobile phone users. We also examine the underlying mechanisms. Mobile phone use improves dietary diversity mainly through better access to purchased foods. These results encourage the promotion of mobile phone technologies as a valuable tool for nutritional improvements, especially in remote rural settings with poor access to food markets.

No abstract

Access to credit is a key prerequisite for the development of smallholder agriculture. However, rural credit markets are typically characterized by market failures and smallholder credit access is limited. Resource‐providing contracts are an institutional tool to overcome credit market failures through the provision of production inputs in the form of in‐kind credit. Previous research has shown that interlinkage of contract and credit helps farmers overcome financial constraints, foster production investments, and hence increase productivities and income. However, if and how such contract schemes affect farmers' overall demand for and access to formal credit from other sources is not yet well understood. In this article, we therefore investigate the associations of the provision of in‐kind credit and farming households' formal credit demand and ability to receive formal credit. We use data of 463 oil palm producers in Ghana and show that participation in contract farming is associated with an increase in credit demand. Concerning credit approval, we find that the outstanding debt of the in‐kind credit scheme is associated with a substantially lower likelihood of credit acceptance. However, the results also suggest that farmers can fully compensate this negative effect by informing the bank about the contract, and thus the source of the debt. This indicates that debt acquired from resource‐providing contract schemes does not necessarily pose an additional credit constraint to farmers. [EconLit Citation G21, G23, O16, O17].

Digital credit is a recent innovation that raises hopes of improving credit access in developing countries. However, up until now, empirical research on the extent to which digital credit actually reaches people who are otherwise excluded from conventional credit markets and whether increased credit access is sustainable or threatened by high default and blacklisting rates is very scarce. Using representative data from Kenya, this article shows that digital credit increases borrowing opportunities, including for people less likely to otherwise have credit access in the conventional credit markets. However, we find that digital credit borrowing is also responsible for 90% of all blacklistings, which is partially driven by higher default rates in the digital credit market but also by a higher probability that digital credit defaults lead to blacklisting of the borrower, compared to defaults in other credit markets.