Grain today, gain tomorrow: Evidence from a storage experiment with savings clubs in Kenya

Aggarwal, Shilpa; Francis, Eilin; Robinson, Jonathan

doi:10.1016/j.jdeveco.2018.04.001

Cited by 56 publications

(50 citation statements)

References 50 publications

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“…A similar savings scheme through group-based grain storage was introduced in Kenya. Fifty eight percent of the farmers took-up the product, and were twice as likely to sell maize on the market (Aggarwal et al, 2018b). While these financial products contribute to the households' welfare, and indirectly increase the return to agricultural production, there is no evidence that they induced higher adoption of fertilizer or other modern technologies.…”

Section: A Credit and Savingsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Using agriculture for development: Supply- and demand-side approaches

Janvry

Sadoulet

2020

World Development

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For most poor countries of today, using agriculture for development is widely recognized as a promising strategy. Yet, in these countries, investment in agriculture has mostly been lagging relative to international norms and recommendations. Current wisdom on how to use agriculture for development is that it requires asset building for smallholder farmers, productivity growth in staple foods, an agricultural transformation (diversification of farming systems toward high value crops), and a rural transformation (value addition through rural non-farm activities linked to agriculture). This sequence has too often been hampered by extensive market and government failures. We outline a theory of change where the removal of market and government failures to use this Agriculture for Development strategy can be addressed through two contrasted and complementary approaches. One is from the "supplyside" where public and social agents (governments, international and bilateral development agencies, NGOs, donors) intervene to help farmers overcome the major constraints to adoption: liquidity, risk, information, and access to markets.

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Section: A Credit and Savingsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Using agriculture for development: Supply- and demand-side approaches

Janvry

Sadoulet

2020

World Development

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“…This paper is most closely related to Basu and Wong (2015) and Aggarwal, Francis and Robinson (2018) which study the effects of experimentally providing farmers with some storage facilities. Aggarwal, Francis and Robinson (2018), in the context of interventions in Kenya, conclude that access to storage may act as an investment instrument rather than a savings instrument and based on their estimations suggest that interventions that help farmers store grain could have better welfare implications compared to encouraging savings in bank. A potential channel through which these effects operate is embedded in an idea from behavioral economics, known as, mental accounting (Thaler 1999).…”

Section: Related Literaturementioning

confidence: 99%

“…Going by the findings of Basu and Wong (2015), it is understandable that the mediating channel would be a favorable budget constraint. If this is so, it is natural to also expect that farmers may be encouraged to invest more in inputs (as suggested by Aggarwal, Francis and Robinson 2018). If the investment is made in productive inputs, one would expect that output and hence yield per unit of land, would rise.…”

Section: Conceptual Frameworkmentioning

confidence: 99%

Storage infrastructure and agricultural yield: evidence from a capital investment subsidy scheme

Chatterjee

2018

Economics

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In a developing economy, the availability of storage infrastructure is considered essential for two purposes; the reduction of post-harvest losses resulting in food shortage, and allowing for gains from inter-temporal trade due to potential arbitrage opportunities arising out of volatility in food grain prices. This paper provides empirical evidence on a lesser studied impact of storage infrastructure, viz, agricultural yield. The author exploits potentially exogenous variation generated by the intensity of access to a capital investment subsidy program for construction and renovation of rural godowns in India to identify causal effects of better storage on yield. He finds that the program led to an increase in rice yield by 0.3 tons per hectare, approximately a 20% increase compared to the baseline. A potential mediating channel for such an effect would be reduced storage costs facilitating better investments in productive inputs. As supportive evidence, the author finds that fertilizer consumption increased by 21% in response to the intervention.

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“…Related work in Minten, Koru, and Stifel (2013) also focuses on remoteness and profitability and documents significant farmer-to-retailer transaction costs to reach price-controlled input cooperatives in a rugged region in northern Ethiopia. 3 Our paper is related to a rapidly growing literature about the effect of roads or other infrastructure improvements on development outcomes and on the spatial distribution of economic activity, 4 which includes a whole host of outcomes other than just prices, including consumption diversity, farm investments, human capital investment, migration, and occupation choice (Aggarwal, 2018a; b; Adukia et al, 2016; Asher and Novosad 2016; Brooks and Donovan, 2017; Morten and Oliveira 2016). In our paper, we focus narrowly on the specific effect of transportation costs on market access (i.e.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Market Access, Trade Costs, and Technology Adoption: Evidence from Northern Tanzania

Aggarwal¹,

Giera²,

Jeong³

et al. 2018

Self Cite

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In this paper, we quantify market access in rural Tanzania, and the extent to which it constrains agricultural productivity. We collect granular data on farmer input and sales decisions, input and output prices, and travel costs in all 1,183 villages in two regions of Tanzania. We find that a village in the 90th percentile of the travel-cost adjusted price distribution faces input and output prices 40-55% less favorable than a village at the 10th percentile. In reduced form, an additional standard deviation of travel time is associated with 20-25% lower input adoption and output sales. We develop and quantify a spatial model of input adoption and conservatively estimate that farmers behave as if they face travel costs of 6% ad-valorem per kilometer of travel, which is equivalent to 40% when traveling to the closest retailer. Holding exogenous local factors fixed, we estimate that reducing travel costs by 50% (approximately the effect of paving rural roads) doubles adoption and reduces the adoption-remoteness gradient by 18%.

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Grain today, gain tomorrow: Evidence from a storage experiment with savings clubs in Kenya

Cited by 56 publications

References 50 publications

Using agriculture for development: Supply- and demand-side approaches

Using agriculture for development: Supply- and demand-side approaches

Storage infrastructure and agricultural yield: evidence from a capital investment subsidy scheme

Market Access, Trade Costs, and Technology Adoption: Evidence from Northern Tanzania

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