Category: Uncategorized

That’s the title of a nice new article in World Development by Henrik Hansen and Neda Trifkovic, both from the University of Copenhagen. Click here for an ungated version.

Here is the abstract:

We estimate the causal effect of food standards on Vietnamese pangasius farmers’ well-being measured by per capita consumption expenditure. We estimate both the average effects and the local average treatment effects on poorer and richer farmers by instrumental variable quantile regression. Our results indicate that large returns can be accrued from food standards, but only for the upper middle-class farmers, i.e., those between the 50% and 85% quantiles of the expenditure distribution. Overall, our result points to an exclusionary impact of standards for the poorest farmers while the richest do not apply standards because the added gain is too small.

The emphasis is mine. If you are like me, your first inclination (after pausing to appreciate the fact that the authors identify a causal effect) was to look up “pangasius” on Wikipedia; here is the entry.

I should note that by “food standards,” what the authors mean here is both quality and safety standards, which are often requested by importing countries. See here for related work of my own, in which I look at the impact of enforcement in the context of contract farming whose output is exported.

As an added bonus, Neda Trifkovic is on Twitter. You can follow her here if you have an interest in food policy in developing countries.

Natalia P. Hule, who writes about agriculture and development in India, had a great post a few weeks ago titled “My Tryst with Organic Farming,” in which she discussed how she tried to implement organic sugarcane farming in Tamil Nadu Mandla, Madhya Pradesh as part of her work.

Natalia begins her story as follows:

When I was working in Mandla, I was keen upon the introduction of organic sugarcane production as many farmers near the town of Mandla have access to irrigation. The town is practically surrounded on 3 sides by the Narmada. I went about this in a thorough fashion and chose to do what is recommended by the Tamil Nadu Agriculture University for organic sugarcane production. Below is a description of how reality smacked me straight in the face.

If Congress does nothing, the status quo will revert back to the original 1949 law — which was based on a complex formula dating back to the pre–World War I era, when the earnings of rural farmers and city dwellers were much closer than they are today, says Marin Bozic, an assistant professor in dairy-foods-marketing economics at the University of Minnesota.

This means the USDA would have to pay dairy farmers about twice as much as it does now. But that doesn’t mean $8 milk for a few reasons:

Congress will probably get its act together. We’ve been down this road before, and dire predictions of $8 milk came to naught. “This is Groundhog Day,” Bozic says. “We woke up, and there’s the same song on the radio. If we don’t get the new farm bill, we’ll get an extension.”

My friend and colleague Marin Bozic, quoted in a Time article last week. The article also features a quote by Andy Novakovic, who was director of the Department of Applied Economics (as it was then known) at Cornell when I began my PhD.

In case you have an interest in dairy markets and policy, Marin has a blog dedicated almost entirely to that sector of the economy. And unlike my usual touch-and-go brand of blogging, Marin actually does serious research for his posts!