Farmers’ Subjective Valuation of Subsistence Crops: The Case of Traditional Maize in Mexico

Abstract

Shadow prices guide farmers' resource allocations, but for subsistence farmers growing traditional crops, shadow prices may bear little relationship with market prices. We econometrically estimate shadow prices of maize using data from a nationally representative survey of rural households in Mexico. Shadow prices are significantly higher than the market price for traditional but not improved maize varieties. They are particularly high in the indigenous areas of southern and southeastern Mexico, indicating large de facto incentives to maintain traditional maize there.

Inverse Productivity or Inverse Efficiency? Evidence from Mexico

“…11. Arslan and Taylor (2009) find that, in indigenous regions of Mexico in particular, farmers excessively value traditional maize varieties and persist in producing them despite falling prices in the market. 12.…”

“…They include transaction costs (proxied by R it , a dummy variable indicating whether a village has only dirt roads); instruments for access to US migration networks (M it ); and ethnicity (IN it , a dummy for whether the household head speaks an indigenous language). Past research finds indigenous status to be significantly and positively related to how households value traditional crops (Arslan & Taylor, 2009) and negatively related to wealth and access to resources (Perales, Benz, & Brush, 2005;Smale et al, 2003). The migration instrument is constructed through predicted values generated from a Poisson regression of the number of migrants in the household on distance to the US border, the state migration rate in 1924, the average state migration rate from 1955-1959, and weighted averages of GDP growth in migrant destination states over the five years preceding each round of the survey.…”

Climate change and the transgenic adaptation strategy: Smallholder livelihoods, climate justice, and maize landraces in Mexico

“…One reason for this is that subsistence producers raise crops partly to produce their own food; hence their agricultural practices are not exclusively market-driven, but reflect the need to reproduce the household (De Janvry, 1981;Eakin, 2006;Isakson, 2009). Some have found that the area under maize production can even increase when maize prices decline, as maize farmers seek to compensate for declining prices by applying their labor more intensively (Dyer et al, 2006;Arslan and Taylor, 2009;Arslan, 2011). 5 Maize continues to be produced when opportunity costs are clearly unfavorable .…”

Assessing the Effectiveness of Projects Supporting On-Farm Conservation of Native Crops: Evidence From the High Andes of South America

“…These systems depend crucially on farmers' preferences, incentives, knowledge, management practices, institutions, and social organization (Bellon, Pham, & Jackson, 1997;Brush, 2004;Zimmerer, 2010). Farmers continue to maintain this diversity-known as de facto conservation-because it provides them with a range of benefits such as adaptation to agro-ecological heterogeneity (Ceccarelli, 1996;di Falco & Chavas, 2009;Worthington, Soleri, Aragon-Cuevas, & Gepts, 2012), ways to manage risk (Cavatassi, Lipper, & Narloch, 2011;di Falco & Chavas, 2009;di Falco & Perrings, 2005), options to obtain more diverse products for consumption and sale (Brush, 1992;Keleman, Hellin, & Flores, 2013;King, 2007), and the provision of marketing opportunities (Devaux et al, 2009;Keleman et al, 2013;King, 2007), not to mention for cultural value (Arslan & Taylor, 2009;Brush, 1992;Isakson, 2011;Perales, Benz, & Brush, 2005;Rana, Garforth, Sthapit, & Jarvis, 2007).…”