As consumers’ demand for organic products and especially organic food grows, organic certification for tropical fruit is increasingly promoted in many developing countries. Certified organic pineapple exports only started taking off after 2005 and are rapidly increasing. The organic and...

Commodity futures markets carry out two important marketing functions with respect to agricultural products: (1) a price discovery role and (2) a price risk management role. The relative effectiveness with which futures markets fulfill these two roles is dependent on the efficiency of the...

This article presents a new framework for the impact evaluation studies of programs that aim to increase efficiency and productivity of firms. Likelihood ratio statistics support a spatial autoregressive stochastic production model that estimates the technical efficiencies of matched subsamples...

This article estimates a worldwide aggregate supply response for key agricultural commodities — wheat, rice, corn, and soybeans — by employing a newly-developed multi-country, crop-calendar-specific, seasonally disaggregated model with price changes and price volatility applied accordingly....

Bioenergy is a major source of energy in developing countries. However, increasing demand for agricultural commodities can lead to a stronger competition for natural resources with the bioenergy production. The nexus among energy, food production and natural resource use may result in trade-offs...

The article analyzes the effect of failing to control for differences in land types (defined by position on a low scale toposequence) on estimates of farm technical efficiency for rice farms in eastern India. In contrast to previous research, we find that farms appear to be considerably more...

This paper shows that using yields may not be informative of the relationship between farm size and productivity in the context of small-scale farming. This occurs because, in addition to productivity, yields pick up size-dependent market distortions and decreasing returns to scale. As a result,...

We use newly-available Indian panel data to estimate how the returns to planting-stage investments vary by rainfall realizations. We show that the forecasts significantly affect farmer investment decisions and that these responses account for a substantial fraction of the inter-annual...

The article analyzes how controlling for differences in land types (defined by position on a low scale toposequence) affects estimates of farm technical efficiency for rice farms in eastern India. Contrasting previous research, we find that farms are considerably more technically efficient when...