IFAD RESERACH SERIES 64 - How the adoption of drought-tolerant rice varieties impacts households in a non-drought year: Evidence from Nepal

Kate Vaiknoras, Catherine Larochelle and Jeffrey Alwang

No 308809, IFAD Research Series from International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD)

Abstract: Stress-tolerant rice varieties (STRVs) are bred to be high yielding and tolerant to climate shocks such as drought. In Nepal, several drought-tolerant STRVs have been released and widely adopted. This paper estimates the impacts of the adoption of STRVs on first- and higher-order household outcomes in a non-drought year. It controls for selection bias using correlated random effects models to eliminate unobserved plot and household-level heterogeneity. STRVs have a higher yield, a lower yield variance and a shorter growing duration than traditional landrace varieties. In addition, households apply more early-season chemical fertilizer and land preparation labour to plots planted to STRVs compared to landraces. This indicates that the first-order impacts of the adoption of STRVs induce behavioural changes that help to modernize agricultural practices. Finally, this study conducts a randomized experiment in which half of the sampled households provided additional detail on their agricultural inputs.

Keywords: Agribusiness; Agricultural and Food Policy; Consumer/Household Economics; Food Consumption/Nutrition/Food Safety (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 40
Date: 2020-12-30
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-agr, nep-dev and nep-env
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ags:unadrs:308809

DOI: 10.22004/ag.econ.308809

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