COOPERATIVE MEMBERSHIP AND TECHNICAL EFFICIENCY OF SMALLHOLDER DAIRY CARBON FARMERS IN KENYA

Vida Mantey, Christine Bosch, Arnold Missiame, Regina Birner, Athena Birkenberg, Viviane Guesbeogo Yameogo and John Mburu

No 344343, IAAE 2024 Conference, August 2-7, 2024, New Delhi, India from International Association of Agricultural Economists (IAAE)

Abstract: Dairy production is an important contributor to food security and poverty reduction, but it is also a major source of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. The development of smallholder agricultural carbon projects, such as the Mt. Elgon project, provides an opportunity for farmers to receive benefits for adopting sustainable practices that not only potentially increase farm productivity but also reduce GHG emissions. While there is growing evidence that agricultural cooperatives in conventional development projects improve the adoption of agricultural technologies and the economic performance of smallholder farms, there is a research gap on the role that dairy cooperatives can play in smallholder agricultural carbon projects. This study examines the role of dairy cooperatives in smallholder agricultural carbon projects and assesses the impact of cooperative membership on the technical efficiency of smallholder dairy carbon farmers in Western Kenya. The study used a mixed methods approach. A participatory and visual mapping tool, Net-Map, was used to identify key actors and their linkages. Stochastic frontier and endogenous switching regression models were used to estimate technical efficiency and assess the impact of cooperative membership on the technical efficiency of smallholder dairy carbon farmers, respectively. The results show that dairy cooperatives in carbon projects play an important role in project design and implementation, as well as in carbon monitoring and reporting. On average, smallholder farmers are 35.3 percent technically efficient, and cooperative members have lower technical efficiency than non-members. This finding can be attributed to the way these dairy cooperatives were set up and the fact that some farmers joined the cooperatives to participate in the project. Furthermore, an average treatment effect on the treated (ATT) and an average treatment effect on the untreated (ATU) of 0.311 and 0.251 respectively was observed. In general, the study concludes that without critical sources of heterogeneity, dairy cooperatives can support smallholder carbon farmers not only to improve their efficiency but also to promote sustainable dairy farming.

Keywords: Livestock; Production/Industries (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 35
Date: 2024-08-07
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-agr, nep-eff, nep-env, nep-hme, nep-mac and nep-ppm
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://ageconsearch.umn.edu/record/344343/files/21951.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ags:cfcp15:344343

DOI: 10.22004/ag.econ.344343

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IAAE 2024 Conference, August 2-7, 2024, New Delhi, India from International Association of Agricultural Economists (IAAE)
Bibliographic data for series maintained by AgEcon Search ().