 Contract Farming and Food SecurityMarc Bellemare and Lindsey Novak American Journal of Agricultural Economics, 2017, vol. 99, issue 2, 357-378 Abstract: Contract farming has often been associated with an increase in the income of participating households. It is unclear, however, whether contract farming increases other aspects of household welfare. We use data from six regions of Madagascar and a selection-on-observables design in which we control for a household’s marginal utility of participating in contract farming, which we elicited via a contingent valuation experiment, to show that participating in contract farming reduces the duration of a household’s hungry season by about eight days on average. Moreover, participation in contract farming makes participating households about 18% more likely to see their hungry season end at any time. Further, we find that these effects are more pronounced for households with more children, and for households with more girls. This is an important result as children—especially girls—often bear the burden of food insecurity. Keywords: Contract farming; outgrower schemes; grower-processor contracts; agricultural value chains; food security (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:oup:ajagec:v:99:y:2017:i:2:p:357-378. Access Statistics for this article American Journal of Agricultural Economics is currently edited by Madhu Khanna, Brian E. Roe, James Vercammen and JunJie Wu More articles in American Journal of Agricultural Economics from Agricultural and Applied Economics Association Contact information at EDIRC. |
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