With the possible exception of nuclear technology, few scientific breakthroughs have generated the level of emotive debate that has surrounded the roll-out of agricultural biotechnology. Initial discussion about the environmental impacts of agricultural genetic modification, are now frequently...

Prepared by Members of the Wheat, Feed Grains, Rice, and Oilseeds Interagency Commodity Estimates Committees U.S. Department of Agriculture

Crop residue use for soil mulch and animal feed are the two major competing purposes and the basic source of fundamental challenge in conservation agriculture (CA) where residue retention on farm plots is one of the three CA principles. Using survey data from Kenya and applying bivariate ordered...

Groundnut is an important component of the national food supply. It does not only have nutritional and dietary value, groundnut also provides cash to farmers; enrich the soil with nitrogen through biological nitrogen fixation; and its haulms can be used as fodder and fuel. Groundnut production...

This article analyses the impact of a water allocation priority policy for a specific crop on farmers’ acreage allocation to different crops. To accomplish this, a system of crop acreage demands conditional on output yields, prices of variable inputs and levels of quasi-fixed inputs is...

This paper investigates the effects of network based individual social capital on the access of rural households to services. In the context of development economics, an innovative data collection approach is used to determine network based social capital. The approach originates from the field...

China’s rural reforms expose farm households to the risk of administrative land reallocation and adjustment. The possibility of land reallocation gives rise to the problem of tenure insecurity which reduces farm households' incentives to invest in the land and to use the labor forces...

Ecological, evolutionary and economic issues involved in introducing genetically modified organisms (GMOs), mainly in agriculture, are discussed. The ecological and evolutionary impacts identified hamper (economic) valuation of GMOs and their biosafety regulation and creates difficulties for...

We estimate a distance function of grains production using generalized method of moments that enables us to accommodate multiple outputs of farmers as well as address the endogeneity issues that are related with the use of distance functions for multi-output production. Using a panel data set of...