Contract Farming and Food Security

Marc Bellemare and Lindsey Novak

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

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. Using 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, we show that participating in contract farming reduces the duration of a household's hungry season by about ten days on average, and that it makes participating households about 20 percent more likely to see their hungry season end at any point in time. Further, we find that these effects are more pronounced for households with a larger number of children, and for households with a larger number of 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)
JEL-codes: L24 O13 O14 Q12 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015-07-28
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cta and nep-dev
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (16)

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Related works:
Journal Article: Contract Farming and Food Security (2017)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pra:mprapa:65817

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