Aligning private incentives with societal goals in smallholder agriculture

Gashaw Abate, Kaleab Baye, Tanguy Bernard, Jordan Chamberlin, Ruth Hill, Rachid Moussadek and Lamine Senghor
Additional contact information
Gashaw Abate: IFPRI - International Food Policy Research Institute [Washington] - CGIAR - Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research [CGIAR]
Kaleab Baye: AAU - Addis Ababa University, Policy-Oriented Research on Africa (IPORA) research consortium, Pessac
Tanguy Bernard: BSE - Bordeaux sciences économiques - UB - Université de Bordeaux - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique - INRAE - Institut National de Recherche pour l’Agriculture, l’Alimentation et l’Environnement
Jordan Chamberlin: International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT), P. O. Box 1041-00641, Nairobi, Kenya
Ruth Hill: IFPRI - International Food Policy Research Institute [Washington] - CGIAR - Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research [CGIAR]
Rachid Moussadek: National Institute for Agricultural Research (INRA), Rabat, Morocco and International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA), Rabat, Morocco.
Lamine Senghor: International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA), Ibadan, Kano Station, Nigeria.

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Abstract: Small-scale farmers in low-income countries are often encouraged to adopt new inputs and practices that generate significant societal benefits, such as improved nutrition, food safety, and environmental sustainability. The limited observability of these attributes, combined with small production scale and misaligned private incentives, leads to adoption levels below the social optimum. Addressing this issue often requires combining instruments identified by different scientific disciplines, spanning across multiple policy sectors, an exercise that is rarely articulated jointly. This paper aims to clarify this, through a simple conceptual framework that explains how farmers decide whether to adopt socially desirable inputs and practices, given the returns and costs they face, their access to financial instruments, and the information and preferences that shape their decisions. It identifies the relevant policy channels, and asks whether the social returns justify the public cost of delivering them. We apply it to three case studies: aflatoxin mitigation, biofortified crop varieties, and conservation agriculture. For each, we identify which parameters bind, which instruments can move them, and how emerging technologies may further contribute. The agenda that follows moves from seeking single-instrument fixes toward identifying the right combination of existing and emerging policy-actionable tools.

Keywords: Sustainable food systems; Agri-food innovations; Smallholder agriculture (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026-08-31
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Published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2026, 123 (36), pp.e2536548123. ⟨10.1073/pnas.2536548123⟩

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hal:journl:hal-05737909

DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2536548123

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