For African agricultural productivity to improve, governments and donors must invest in programs and policies that will improve the incentives and capacity of farmers to make investments that increase farm productivity and soil fertility while protecting the environment. With rapid population...

Forests support rural livelihoods and food security in many developing countries by providing critical sources of food, medicine, shelter, building materials, fuels, and cash income. The increasing demand for forest products has enhanced rural livelihoods and enabled the expansion of domestic...

The Michigan Agriculture Environmental Assurance Program (MAEAP) is a voluntary environmental program (VEP) initiated in 1999 by a coalition of state government agencies and agricultural, environmental and conservation groups in Michigan. We survey Michigan livestock producers and conduct...

The impact of environmental disasters on consumers’ perceptions and preferences for specific food items has seldom been studied in the applied economics literature. Recent aquatic disasters, namely the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Disaster, have had profound...

The advancement of South America’s agro-pastoral frontier has been widely linked to losses in biodiversity and tropical forests, with particular impacts on the Brazilian cerrado, the Atlantic Forest, and the Amazon. Here I consider an important, yet largely overlooked, driver of South...

Previous studies have identified regulatory preemption and differentiation as two main motives for participation in voluntary environmental programs (VEPs). This research examines the motivations of livestock farmers to participate in the Michigan Agricultural Environmental Assurance Program...