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An article in the latest issue of Food Policy by my grad-school colleague and coauthor Sudha Narayanan explores the heterogeneity in welfare gains from participating in high-value agriculture for South Indian smallholder farmers:

This paper assesses the variable impact of participation in high value agriculture through contract farming arrangements in southern India. Using survey data for 474 farmers in four commodity sectors, gherkins, papaya marigold and broiler, an endogenous switching model is used to estimate net profits from participation. Findings suggest that average treatments effect vary widely across contract commodities. Papaya and broiler contracting offer clear net gains for participants whereas marigold contracting leaves participants worse off. For gherkins, while contracting holds net gains for participating farmers overall, this is true of contracts with some firms but not others. The standard deviations of point estimates of treatment effects are quite large indicating variability in profit gains even within the same commodity sectors. Thus, notwithstanding the sign of average treatment effects, contract farming arrangements have diverse impacts on income for individual farmers and these could have implications for sustained participation of farmers in high value agriculture.

After looking at correlations between participation in contract farming and welfare in the late 1990s and early to mid-2000s, the literature began focusing on both internal validity (by using more sophisticated means of teasing out causal relationships from correlations) and external validity (by looking at more than one commodity) in the late 2000s and early 2010s. It’s nice to see the literature delve a bit deeper now by looking at the heterogeneity in treatment effects.

This is also the only study I know of where a negative welfare effect is reported (for marigold farming). Such findings are presumably rare because contracts in which growers lose out tend to not last more than one or two seasons.

Q: Do you have a food message that you want to convey?

A: Part of my live show is a 20-minute political diatribe called “10 things I’m pretty sure that I’m sure about food.” It’s basically a slide-show lecture wrapped up in a rant. I think that my overarching message in it is, “Look, we’ve gotten to where we’ve idolized food to the point that we’re missing the experience.” You know, the most magical thing about food is its ability to connect human beings to one another. That’s the real miracle of food.

But if you’re looking so closely at the food that you miss the people you’re sitting with, then food is no longer a good thing. Then it’s a bad thing. I think those of us in the food media have to be very, very, very careful how much we objectify the food itself.

From a Q&A with Alton Brown in the Minneapolis Star Tribune.

Jeffrey Sachs … holds to a model of economic development in which poverty cannot be broken piecemeal, but must be attacked on all fronts at once. Perhaps people cannot save for the future because they are too poor or too unhealthy, or both; perhaps they cannot improve their health or their productivity without the investments that depend on saving; or perhaps their productivity is low because they are not adequately nourished which, in turn, comes about because their productivity is so low. These vicious circles cause “poverty traps” from which people cannot escape except through a “big push” from outside. “In order to make lasting changes in any one sphere of development, we must improve them all”, argues the website of the Millennium Villages, where “all” comprises eight categories: education, mother and child health, business and entrepreneurship, gender equality, technology, the environment and intervention, water and energy, and food. (Note the “we”, which presumably means the western visitors to the website.)

Continue readingAngus Deaton on Development Bloat