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Category: Policy

Published November 2, 2011

Assessing the Impacts of Telemedicine

My Sanford School colleague Manoj Mohanan talks about one of his current research projects, which aims about assessing the impacts of telemedicine in India:

 

Published October 26, 2011

Eight Foods to Ban Before Foie Gras

Photo Credit: Alamy.

In less than a year, foie gras will be banned from Californian restaurants. From an article in the food section of the HuffPost:

The consumption of foie gras is a hotly contested issue worldwide, but we can’t help but think that there are foods that are more controversial than duck liver. Foie gras is a delicacy consumed by few. Foods like feedlot beef and farmed salmon are sold on a much larger scale, so consuming them arguably has a much bigger impact not only in terms of animal rights, but also for human and environmental health.

The article also includes a slideshow to illustrate what those eight foods are.

In the interest of full disclosure and of admitting to my biases, however, I should probably add that I really like foie gras, and that I wish the French bistro around the corner from my house served it more often.

Published October 26, 2011

Smallholder Participation in Contract Farming: Comparative Evidence from Five Countries

That’s the title of a forthcoming article of mine (co-authored with Chris Barrett, Maren Elise Bachke, Hope Michelson, Sudha Narayanan, and Tom Walker) in World Development, in which we lay out a conceptual framework to study the participation of farm households in agricultural value chains in developing countries and survey the recent empirical evidence on the topic.

Here is the abstract:

Supermarkets, specialized wholesalers, processors, and agro-exporters are transforming the marketing channels into which smallholder farmers sell produce in low-income economies. We develop a conceptual framework with which to study contracting between smallholders and a commodity-processing firm. We then synthesize results from empirical studies of contract farming arrangements in five countries (Ghana, India, Madagascar, Mozambique, and Nicaragua). The resulting meta-narrative documents patterns of participation, the welfare gains associated with participation, reasons for nonparticipation, the significant extent of contract noncompliance, and the considerable dynamism of these value chains as farmers and firms enter and exit frequently.