This past Sunday I was presenting at the annual conference of the Centre for the Study of African Economies at Oxford. The topic of my talk was “Smallholder Participation in Contract Farming and Food Security,” a paper in which my coauthor Lindsey Novak and I look at the relationship between smallholder participation in agricultural value chains and the duration of the hungry season–how many months\u00a0those households went\u00a0without eating three meals a day over the last year–experienced by those smallholder households in Madagascar.<\/p>\n
In our paper, we find that<\/p>\n
As we write in the paper, this is important for two reasons. First and foremost, though we know from Bellemare (2012)<\/a> that participation in contract farming is associated with higher levels of income. But what we do not know is whether smallholders manage to keep the cash income they receive from contract farming after the harvest until the hungry season that precedes the following almost a year later. Second, almost\u00a0all of the literature on contract farming has focused on the effects of participation on income. We felt that it was time to look at slightly longer causal chains, and food security struck us as particularly important to look at.<\/p>\n You can find my slides here<\/a>. In the paper, which Lindsey and I hope to debut sometime this\u00a0summer, we will make sure not to insist too much\u00a0on policy recommendations<\/a>…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" This past Sunday I was presenting at the annual conference of the Centre for the Study of African Economies at Oxford. The topic of my<\/p>\n