EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Pesticides: What You Don’t Know Can Hurt You

Joseph Goeb, Andrew Dillon, Frank Lupi and David Tschirley ()

Journal of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists, 2020, vol. 7, issue 5, 801 - 836

Abstract: Agricultural intensification can negatively affect farmer and social welfare through health and environmental externalities if producers have imperfect knowledge of the risks posed by agricultural inputs. This paper explores the effects of health-risk information on the demand for substitutes in the pesticides market and farmer preferences for risk-mitigating technologies using a choice experiment integrated with a randomized controlled trial in Zambia. Environmental health-risk information provided through a farmer training program had an insignificant effect on demand for risk-mitigating personal protective equipment but a significant effect on demand for substitutes, lower toxicity pesticides. The treatment group was twice as likely to substitute a highly toxic pesticide with a low toxicity pesticide after receiving training. What farmers do not know can hurt them and the environment through lower demand for less risky and less damaging substitutes.

Date: 2020
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/709782 (application/pdf)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/709782 (text/html)
Access to the online full text or PDF requires a subscription.

Related works:
Working Paper: Pesticides: What you don’t know can hurt you (2017) Downloads
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:ucp:jaerec:doi:10.1086/709782

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Journal of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists from University of Chicago Press
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Journals Division ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-20
Handle: RePEc:ucp:jaerec:doi:10.1086/709782