Do others’ health count for peanuts? Health, market returns, and pro-sociality

Gashaw T. Abate, Tanguy Bernard, Joshua Deutschmann and Fatou Fall

No 2346, GSSP working papers from International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI)

Abstract: Individuals often make decisions considering both private returns and welfare impacts on others. Food safety decisions by smallholder agricultural producers exemplify this choice, particularly in low-income countries where farmers often consume some of the food crops they produce and sell or donate the rest. We conduct a lab-in-the-field experiment with peanuts producers in Senegal to study the decision to invest in food safety information, exogenously varying the degree of private returns (monetary or health-wise) and welfare impacts on others. Producers are willing to pay real money for food safety information even absent the potential for private returns, but willingness to pay increases with the potential for private returns. A randomized information treatment significantly increases willingness to pay in all scenarios. Our results shed light on the complex interplay between altruism and economic decisions in the presence of externalities, and point to the potential of timely and targeted information to address food safety issues.

Keywords: food safety; health; groundnuts; aflatoxins; smallholders; returns; Senegal; Africa; Sub-Saharan Africa; Western Africa (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025-07-07
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://hdl.handle.net/10568/175569

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:fpr:gsspwp:175569

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in GSSP working papers from International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().