Misperceived Quality: Fertilizer in Tanzania

Hope Michelson, Brenna Ellison, Anna Fairbairn, Annemie Maertens and Victor Manyong

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: Fertilizer use remains below recommended rates in most of Sub-Saharan Africa, contributing to poor crop yields and poverty. Farmers voice suspicion that available fertilizer is often adulterated, but these concerns are not backed by reliable evidence. In fact, an insight from industry but absent from academic literature is that profitable fertilizer adulteration is difficult. We surveyed all fertilizer sellers in Morogoro Region, Tanzania and tested 633 samples of their fertilizer. We also conducted a willingness-to-pay assessment with farmers. We find that fertilizers meet nutrient standards but that belief of rampant product adulteration persists among farmers. We find evidence of a quality inference problem in the market: 25% of fertilizer has deteriorated in observable ways and farmers rely on these observable attributes to (incorrectly) assess unobservable nutrient quality. We show that this misperception likely reduces technology adoption beyond the effect of nutrient quality being unobservable.

Keywords: agriculture; fertilizer; input adoption; technology adoption; quality; Sub-Saharan Africa (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D8 D82 O1 O10 O13 Q12 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018-10-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-agr and nep-dev
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Downloads: (external link)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/90798/1/MPRA_paper_90798.pdf original version (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Misperceived quality: Fertilizer in Tanzania (2021)
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:pra:mprapa:90798

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany Ludwigstraße 33, D-80539 Munich, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Joachim Winter ().