Impact of modern agricultural technologies on smallholder welfare: Evidence from Tanzania and Ethiopia

Abstract

This paper evaluates the potential impact of adoption of improved legume technologies on rural household welfare measured by consumption expenditure in rural Ethiopia and Tanzania. The study utilizes cross-sectional farm household level data collected in 2008 from a randomly selected sample of 1313 households (700 in Ethiopia and 613 in Tanzania). The causal impact of technology adoption is estimated by utilizing endogenous switching regression. This helps us estimate the true welfare effect of technology adoption by controlling for the role of selection problem on production and adoption decisions. Our analysis reveals that adoption of improved agricultural technologies has a significant positive impact consumption expenditure (in per adult equivalent terms) in rural Ethiopia and Tanzania. This confirms the potential role of technology adoption in improving rural household welfare as higher consumption expenditure from improved technologies translate into lower poverty, higher food security and greater ability to withstand risk. An analysis of the determinants of adoption highlighted inadequate local supply of seed, access to information and perception about the new cultivars as key constraints for technology adoption.

Economic performance of community based bean seed production and marketing in the central rift valley of Ethiopia

“…On the other hand, households located in villages where a grain market is present were expected to face competition from the latter when selling their seed from CBSME and be discouraged from participating or obtaining seed from the CBSME. Contact with extension was expected to exert an influence on the access to information and skills necessary for started up of CBSME and choice of seed source (Feder et al, 1985;Asfaw et al, 2012).…”

Crop Upgrading Strategies and Modelling for Rainfed Cereals in a Semi-Arid Climate—A Review

“…Other causes include population growth, poverty, weak institutions and infrastructure, high dependency on rainfed agriculture, unequal global trade relationships, and poor soil fertility [4][5][6]. There are also constraints related to the production value chain in general, food access [5,7] due to geographical locations and associated eating behaviors [8], socio-economic status [9], technology adoption [10,11], and sustainable production [12][13][14].…”

Profit efficiency analysis among groundnut farmers from Malawi

“…Despite the crucial role of dryland legumes for poverty reduction, inefficiencies and lack of technological change have often restricted small producers into subsistence production and contributed to the stagnation of the sector in developing countries (Asfaw et al, 2012;Ghosh and Mandal, 2015;Shiferaw et al, 2011). Groundnut (Arachis hypogaea (L.)), also known as peanut, is an oilseed crop, principally grown by smallholder farmers in developing countries under rain-fed condition (Freman et al, 1999;Okello et al, 2010).…”

“…Moreover, studies found that land expansion seems impossible since the population keeps on increasing and subsequently, the per-capita land is already at its minimal making it impossible to expand the area under cultivation (Asfaw et al, 2012;de Janvry et al, 2003;Islam, 1995). The second option of increasing productivity through technology innovation and application also requires complementation since it faces several constraints like, technology adoption is time consuming, requires high level of technical knowledge to implement, can be risky, costly and inaccessible, which hinders technology adoption (Abateet al, 2016;Brick and Visser, 2015;Lambrecht et al, 2014;Parks et al, 2015).…”